George Packard provides context for the Robert Barchi story. Read and understand.

Jane Austen will be on the £10 note.

… UD rides into town to save his ass.

Barchi wants to hold on to two corporate money-for-nothing seats. Who wouldn’t? But as the leader of the state senate points out, they are both grotesquely obvious conflicts of interest. The corporations in question even do business with Rutgers.

Barchi would be an idiot to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars of free money, yes. But his job, and whatever reputation Rutgers has left after its zillions of other scandals, are in peril. What to do? Hm, hm, hm…

So far, Rutgers hasn’t done much of anything. Barchi seems to think he can wait this one out, stonewall until everyone loses interest. UD isn’t sure this is a good move. UD can think of a better move.

Barchi can take for his model here the NCAA’s chief legal counsel, who warns that Ed O’Bannon’s class action lawsuit (details here) “threatens college sports as we know it.”

Take the high road, in other words. Go the dignity route. University presidents on corporate boards, university football and basketball – these are beautiful things, with venerable traditions… things we threaten at our peril… things that are simply the heart and soul of the great American university. When you threaten a president’s ability to double her compensation by attending biannual meetings with a biotech at the Regis Bora Bora, you threaten university life as we know it.

Despite Alexander Broughton’s ongoing legal effort to clear his fraternity’s name (see the famous video of Broughton and his attorney at the link), the University of Tennessee has shut down Pi Kappa Alpha — a significant setback for wine enemaists at UT. (Scroll down for background.)

Broader reforms have come to all UT frats in the wake of the butt-chugging incident, including mandated live-in house directors. “With friends like these,” said Marilee Studevort, vice-president of student life, “you don’t need enemas.”

Okay, I made up that last thing.

And yet this strange panorama makes a trip to the Burj inadvertently sublime. Every monument, at its inception, gives rise to its future ruin, and yet few face the prospect as directly as the Burj. From its state-of-the-art observation deck, one beholds the ageless, ungoverned desert. Futility is never more futilely refuted than with a monument. The Burj seems to have been erected to elucidate this fact.

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From The Names:

“I can’t get the Empty Quarter out of my mind. We flew right over the dunes, man, nothing but sand, a quarter of a million square miles. A planet of sand. Sand mountains, sand plains and valleys. Sand weather, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty degrees, and I can’t imagine what it’s like when the wind’s blowing. I tried to convince myself it was beautiful. The desert, you know. The vast sweep. But it scared me. This Aramco guy told me he can stand on the airstrip they have out there and he can hear the blood flowing in his body. Is it the silence or the heat that makes this possible? Or both? Hear the blood.”

… (or anyway that’s the famous phrase we all like) characterizes quite a few American universities.

Some of these village idiots aren’t in rural settings at all – echt-provincial Suffolk University (Boston), St. John’s University (New York), Yeshiva University (New York), and St. Louis University (St. Louis) are four urban cow towns whose brainless money grubbing (self-righteous money grubbing at that, if, like Yeshiva, St. John’s, and St. Louis, they align themselves with synagogues and churches) this blog has chronicled.

All American universities have closed, small-town aspects to them; here, we’re talking about truly tribal fortresses with certifiable martinets.

To turn a university (think of the word itself) into a banana republic, you need — call it structural cronyism. The president, the board of trustees, the coaches, the big-time donors — in order to make an intellectual institution deadhead central, all must be in synch.

You see the model at work at Oakland University in Michigan, whose women’s basketball coach was married to the school’s president. (Yes, yes, UD believes people should marry whoever they want.) Power seems to have gone to the coach’s head to the point where she did a sort of Mike Rice on her players, who report – among other cult rituals – bizarre physical and religious tests. Things got so weird that the Ceausescus of Oakland have now been toppled; but you’d think schools would learn, from one story after another of this sort, the difference between cherishing their particular identities and becoming rural idiots.

UD‘s neighbor in Summit, New York – just a bit further up Seven Ponds Road, in the house Wojtek Fangor used to own – is Yasuo Minagawa. He’s featured in today’s Wall Street Journal.

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UD thanks her sister-in-law, Joanna, for the link.

It’s an old tradition, and an important one, among our highest-profile student athletes: Showing your team colors while in the act of armed robbery.

Back in ’09, several University of Tennessee Vols did it; and now a University of West Virginia Mountaineer has picked up the torch.

West Virginia defensive lineman Korey Harris was arrested Friday for first-degree armed robbery that allegedly occurred in Morgantown on July 12. Harris and two other men broke into a home and held two victims at gunpoint. It presumably didn’t take long to catch Harris, as one of the victims saw the number 96 on Harris’s team-issued sweatpants and figured it out.

Whether Cohen will ultimately face criminal charges, Frenkel said to “look at the example” of Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs director charged in the insider trading investigation of Raj Rajaratnam’s Galleon Group. “The SEC brought an administrative action against Gupta,” Frenkel recalled, “and within 30 days, the next thing you know, there’s a criminal indictment.”

Will our highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, get hit with criminal, and not just administrative actions? Stay tuned!

“Bitch set me up.”

But Forbes should be much more ashamed for having published the mindless POS the principal plagiarized.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm is impressed with one wrinkle here. The plagiarizing principal personalized the stolen material:

[The original author] wrote in the Forbes column about Lori Garver’s rise to deputy administrator of NASA,: “Like so many other successful people, Lori has always been driven more by what inspires her than what scares her. She’s always been willing to challenge assumptions, and push the boundaries of possibility.”

[The plagiarist] switched the focus to herself, writing: “Like so many others, I have always been driven more by what inspires me than what scares me. I have always been willing to challenge assumptions and push the boundaries of possibility.”

SOS suggests that for her next plagiarism (as you know if you read this blog, plagiarists almost never stop at one), the principal aim higher. Make Edward Kennedy’s famous eulogy for Robert Kennedy your own!

I saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Aim even higher!

I am a woman, take me for all in all. You shall not look upon my like again.

Higher!!

For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.

La Kid, last month.
Giant’s Causeway in the rain.

Er, none; and if you want to understand what’s going on at the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey, at the University of Miami, or the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, you could do worse – as this commenter on a recent article has it – than think in terms of criminal syndicates.

People wonder why Colin McGinn, a philosophy professor accused of sexual harassment, opted to leave UM rather than fight. Well, some reports had it that President Shalala was in a rage and would make sure he was fired.

If this is true, it would make perfect sense in the context of UM’s years of criminal scandals. We are talking, at schools like UMDNJ, Chapel Hill and UM, about scandal-fatigue, about administrations that are saying stop. No more.

Basically McGinn has the misfortune of teaching at a school that can’t afford any more bad publicity. Its president is really pissed off. She didn’t sign on to be the butt of jokes, a permanent petitioner at the NCAA, a symbol of what’s worst in American universities. You come to her with some guy in philosophy who somebody says wrote some smutty remarks to a student and BOOM! That’s it. Donna’s had it. She explodes. All of her problems come from men. Men who beat up other men on the football field. Men who buy whores and cars for her athletes. Men who write smutty emails… Of course the irony is that of all the men beating up on Donna, McGinn is by far the most innocuous; in fact, he’s liable to be innocent of the charges. But McGinn has had the misfortune of being the last in line, the tipping point. Right now, Shalala is like Iran’s Revolutionary Guard: You whip out a cigarette and she’ll fucking blow you away.

… has made a remarkable film about mass killings in Indonesia. It is echt postmodern in being a surreal reenactment – by the killers themselves – of long-ago events altogether too real. Hyperreal.

“The Act of Killing” becomes a complex rendering of men for whom guilt has no normal way of expressing itself, and for whom killing was, from the very start, a kind of theatrical performance.

I think there’s a link between this film and the uproar over the adorable rock and roll photo of Tsarnaev on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone. Those who massacred in Indonesia did so in part under the glamorizing influence of American gangster movies. The editors who cynically aestheticized Tsarnaev’s image on their cover did so under the influence of the same violence-glamor, violence-voyeurism.

In his basically positive review of Josh’s film, the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane says he doesn’t understand what Oppenheimer means when he calls The Act of Killing “a documentary of the imagination.” But what’s not to understand? Does Lane have trouble with

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare…

also? Sometimes historical conditions make it possible for people to act out their most brutal fantasies; sometimes things get so sick that we glamorize the most brutal among us. Humanity’s self-alienation, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936, “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Without artists like Oppenheimer (and, say, writers like The White Hotel‘s D.M. Thomas, and other filmmakers like Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, who made Hitler: A Film from Germany) we’d get even more lost in that funhouse than we are.

Its richest, highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, has just been sued by the SEC for failure to respond to insider trading at his hedge fund. Despite the personal fortune of nine or so billion dollars on which Cohen can draw in his defense, chances are good that he will be banned from the securities industry.

Brown has already had to deal, recently, with a crooked trustee. Brown’s last president notoriously signed off on Lloyd Blankfein’s 2007 Goldman Sachs bonus of $68 million.

Does Brown wish to be a laughingstock? The sort of place fronted by people full of high-minded rhetoric about the social good, and run by people whose greed – and collusion in greed – knows no bounds?

How long will Steven Cohen continue to be a Brown University trustee?