The political scientist also attributes part of his decision to retire now to Penn State, which he calls “phenomenally weird, following a North Korean governance model without the transparency” and an “authoritarian hellhole.” The Jerry Sandusky case didn’t help, he said.

A fascinating letter exchange is going on in the pages of the Roanoke Times about America’s Number Four party school.

It started innocently enough, with a caution to Virginia Tech fans as football season starts up.

West Virginia University has done nothing to curb the violent behavior of their fans and Virginia Tech has been warned of the violence.

Now UD has proposed that West Virginia University – smack dab in the heart of pillbilly territory – stop serving alcohol in the stadium and start unloading Lortabs. But so far no one in Morgantown is listening, so they’ve still got this violence problem.

Anyway, here’s the cascade of refutations. VT’s just as bad. VT fans wear VT gear to WVU games so they’re asking for it. It happens, it’s part of the game I think it makes the game fun (quoting this post’s headline).

It continues, more or less along the same lines, here. Violence, violence, everywhere.

**********************

The War Room. Eat Your Enemies. I mean – hyuk! – don’t take no genius to know why this shit’s happening.

Congratulations, you have an opportunity to become an educated man and play great college football. A University of Virginia degree is one of the most prestigious in America. As the head football coach at this University, I want to formerly extend a scholarship offer to you.

Over the last decade, local debt in the Lone Star State has more than doubled, growing at twice the rate of inflation plus population growth. At the moment, Texas localities owe $63 billion for education funding — 155 percent more than they did a decade ago, though student enrollment and inflation during that period grew less than one-third as quickly. The borrowing has also paid for a host of expensive new athletic facilities, such as a $60 million high school football stadium, complete with video scoreboard, in the Dallas suburb of Allen.

… But perhaps the highest-profile example of the renewed fighting feminist spirit in Israel has been the stunning success this year of Women of the Wall (WOW), currently led by Anat Hoffman… The group has been conducting women’s prayer services on the first day of the Jewish month at the Western Wall for 25 years, arousing the fury of the ultra-Orthodox authorities tasked with overseeing the holy site. WOW draws worshippers from all strands of religious practice; some members dress in traditionally male ritual garments — such as a yarmulke, tallis, and phylacteries — and also sing aloud. These practices run counter to ultra-Orthodox tradition, and more than one woman has been arrested because the law supported the Haredi view that the Western Wall is in effect an ultra-Orthodox synagogue, and the failure of worshippers to respect “local custom” at the site was a criminal act.

[T]his spring, WOW scored substantial political and legal victories. The Jerusalem district court ruled in the women’s favor. And Israel’s attorney general decided in May not to appeal that ruling. As a result, for the first time, at WOW’s monthly prayer meeting in May, police actively protected the women worshipping at the wall and instead arrested Haredi protesters who threatened them. One of the real surprises of WOW’s new legitimacy is the support it has amassed from not just the previously indifferent secular public — three female Knesset members joined the group in prayer over the spring — but from an increasing number of modern-Orthodox women.

*************************

UD, Women of the Wall rally

last March, in Washington DC.

A former student of his asks a question.

I was lucky enough to be at a dinner for [Bellah] after a talk he gave at Yale, and a former student of his asked him about his experience of graduate school. “I really enjoyed it,” he said. What about being a junior professor? “I enjoyed that too!” he said, smiling. The former student asked him, “Was there ever a period of life you didn’t enjoy?” He smiled and paused thoughtfully. “Well, my wife died recently, and that was simply a fact I had to endure. But, basically, I enjoy life.”

I wanna be like these long-lived Episcopalian guys – like Bellah, and like Richard Wilbur, who’s 92 and still at it.

“I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy,” [Wilbur] explained in an interview with Peter Stitt in the Paris Review, “that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that’s my attitude.”

You don’t have to be Episcopalian.

Then he ended with a question to the Dalai Lama: “Your Holiness, can you tell us what was the happiest moment of your life? “ A silence full of expectation fell in the room, composed of a dozen scientists, some Buddhist scholars and meditators, and a hundred guests. The Dalai Lama paused for a while, looked up in space, as if seeking an answer deep within himself, then suddenly, he leaned forward and said to the Japanese scholar in a resounding voice, “I think …. Now !”

Maybe you don’t even have to be religious.

Beethoven said a thing as rash and noble as the best of his work. By my memory, he said: ‘He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again.’

We all knew the saying We want to build a university our football team can be proud of would be literalized someday. But who knew Argentina would get there first?

Ian Hacking discusses the perennially expanding petals of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness. The latest revision of the DSM is now out, it’s published, it’s a done deal, so instead of people trying to change it or delegitimize it, you’ve got people reviewing it.

Like Hacking. Hacking’s philosophical, logic-based approach considers the DSM a bureaucratically useful fiction: We couldn’t have paid mental health treatment without it. But as “a representation of the nature or reality of the varieties of mental illness,” the DSM is a total failure. Its classificatory system assumes an object with a genealogy and a reasonably stable real-world character. Yet any given mental disorder lacks originary biomarkers as much as it lacks existential discreteness. Thus Hacking makes much of the DSM‘s recourse to the NOS (Not Otherwise Specified) category:

An entry [will] begin with a generic disorder, pass to various species and subspecies, and finally to NOS. Thus in DSM-IV, genus: ‘Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders’. Eight species: e.g. Schizophrenia. Five subspecies: e.g. Catatonic Type (295.20). After the first seven species with their subspecies, we come to the eighth: Psychotic Disorder, NOS (298.9). Some 32 generic disorders end with a species NOS, where patients are judged to fall under the generic heading but not under any of the specific headings… DSM-5 does its best to drop NOS, but often ends up with a mess. Thus we now have ‘Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders’ with a structure pretty different from that of DSM-IV. There is now a species ‘Catatonia’, with two subspecies, ‘Catatonia Associated with Another Mental Disorder (Catatonia Specifier)’ (289.89), and ‘Catatonic Disorder due to Another Medical Condition’ (293.89). The generic entry ends with a noncoded ‘Unspecified Catatonia’. This applies when we cannot make out the underlying condition, or the ‘full criteria are not met’, or if we simply lack information. Then we read ‘coding note: Code first 781.89 … followed by 293.89 unspecified catatonia’, which sounds very much like NOS.

Everything sort of gutters into anything, in other words. “If,” says Hacking, “I started trying to explain the new categories under schizophrenia, I would get lost in the forest. Indeed, in reading these sections I felt unable to see the tree – schizophrenia – for all the branches that were on display.”

The DSM embodies a strange procedure whereby, as Rilke writes in his fifth Duino Elegy:

the pure too-little

is changed incomprehensibly -, altered

into that empty too-much.

A supremely ironic, supremely self-consuming artifact, then, the DSM elaborates a thing to extinction. The book turns out to be a seek and destroy mission; only billable codes are left standing. Hacking rightly describes this take on the DSM as “a far more radical criticism of it than [NIH director Thomas] Insel’s claim that the book lacks ‘validity’. I am saying it is founded on a wrong appreciation of the nature of things.”

With a full blank slate as background, as it were, research has been easy to corrupt. “[U]niversity research departments and learned journals are [often] funded by those who stand to profit – literally – from their presumed objectivity,” writes Will Self in his review of the DSM.

For the last two days, UD has been here, helping her aunt settle in. While not quite as opulent as a football facility at the University of Oregon, it’s certainly beautiful and peaceful and full of kind people.

The landscaping is terrific.

All the butterflies are out.
(UD‘s sister took this picture.)

Yesterday afternoon, the director of life enhancement stopped UD while UD was wheeling her aunt around the campus and escorted UD and her aunt to a little concert in a nearby building. A quartet of scruffy amusing fiftyish guys with guitars and drums led the way-oldies in a singalong. UD‘s aunt tapped her toes a bit, and UD belted out Those Were the Days My Friend plus the Beatles and Elvis.

Even the audience members who happened to be awake had very weak voices, so it fell to ol’ UD plus the staff, which circulated among the residents grabbing their hands and swinging them up and down to the beat, to carry off the singalong. It fell to UD and the staff to do the life, never mind the life enhancement.

As in those Roethke lines —

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling…

— UD felt herself a ridiculous impertinent envoy from life, self-deputized to make everyone care whether they lived or died.

Nike University’s new facility: The reviews are in!

On Andrew Sullivan’s site, an echt-bloggische exchange. Sullivan and his readers have been making fun of sexually suggestive names (inspired by A. Weiner). One of his readers writes to complain:

As someone with an unusual last name in which teenagers and adolescents can find a sexual reference if they try hard enough, I can assure you that all those “Dicks” and “Weiners” out there have heard the same jokes over and over. How about moving along?

Sullivan responds:

You think I have my own blog so I can “move along” when talking about funny names?

… Anthony Tommasini, New York Times music critic, because he writes really well. His review of Bayreuth’s recent train wreck of a Ring Cycle is a thing of beauty. Excerpts:

When Frank Castorf, the avant-garde German director responsible for this confounding concept, took the stage with his production team, almost the entire audience, it seemed, erupted with loud, prolonged boos. It went on for nearly 10 minutes, by my watch, because Mr. Castorf, 62, who has been running the Volksbühne (People’s Theater) of Berlin since 1992, stood steadfast onstage, his arms folded stiffly. He sometimes jabbed a finger at the audience, essentially defying the crowd to keep it coming.

… Mr. Castorf presents the “Ring” as a metaphorical story of the global quest for oil, with the resulting era of war, oppression, corporate greed and environmental destruction. But Mr. Castorf did not follow through with this theme very consistently.

In the first act of “Siegfried,”which opened on Monday, Mr. Castorf and the set designer, Aleksandar Denic, playfully evoke the battle over energy that was a major component of the cold war. The setting is supposed to show the forest dwelling where Mime, the Nibelung dwarf, has raised the orphaned Siegfried into brawny young manhood. Here Mime’s home is a trailer-park campsite in front of a stunning scenic riff on Mount Rushmore: The faces of the American presidents have been replaced by Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. But often the oil quest imagery just seems slapped on, literally: for no clear reasons, singers smear one another with crude oil.

… [N]ear the end of “Siegfried” …(you can’t make this up) a monster crocodile swallowed the poor Forest Bird in one big gulp.

This last scene, of course, is the ecstatic love duet between Siegfried, our rambunctious hero (who, by the way, instead of forging a sword assembles a semiautomatic rifle), and the smitten Brünnhilde. In this production, at the most climactic moment in the music, the stage rotated to reveal two of those monster crocodiles busily copulating.

… [One] crucial scene … begins at the Marxist Mount Rushmore, then moves to an almost-reproduction of the Alexanderplatz, the Socialist-era transit hub and shopping center in Berlin.

[At another point, a singer] scurried up a stairway to consult a hairy-chested man, who wheels a baby carriage down the stairs, spilling its contents — potatoes — everywhere. At least they looked like potatoes. If you are expecting me to explain this (or Wotan’s being orally serviced — one Rhinemaiden sucking oil off the finger of another as they look longingly into each other’s eyes), I am sorry to disappoint you…

This oil business reminds me of another avant-garde effort, in the pages of Vogue.

When UD saw that name in the news this morning, it stirred a memory… She’d written about Evan Dobelle years ago on this blog…

So she checked her archives, and there it was – Dobelle was busy being fired, back in ’04, from the presidency of the University of Hawaii. He was accused of excessive personal spending.

The University of Hawaii is among this country’s very worst university systems, so Dobelle was moving into a laughable mess when he took that job. On the other hand, he does seem to have spent lavishly, with little in the way of results.

Dobelle, who jumps from job to job with suspicious rapidity, is, à ce moment-là, president of one Westfield State University, where damned if he isn’t facing exactly the same charges.

She’s got the fiction part down.

Well, the local media’s got hold of the Charles Bennett story, and people in South Carolina think it’s a bit odd that after Bennett was booted out of Northwestern University for stealing grant funds (background here), the University of South Carolina turned around and picked him right up, giving him an endowed chair and a salary of close to $300,000. Crime pays.

USC’s spokesman came out with the brilliant response I quote in my title. The school can’t comment on any phenomenon that doesn’t involve USC. The allegations are a matter of public record, everyone’s commenting on them, but USC has a policy of not commenting on anything in the world that happens that doesn’t involve USC.

I guess the principle extends to hiring at USC too — since whatever Bennett did in Chicago doesn’t involve USC, he’s in. When Bennett steals USC grant money, then USC will review his position… Because then it will involve USC…