I

Doldrums

From her chilled house with condensation on all its windows, UD contemplates her privilege.

Yesterday through the watery streaks she saw – she thinks – a small bear at the top of her property. It was too small to be a deer – she thinks – and had a hunched crawling way about it … There are bears, now, in Bethesda, and what better place for them to gather than the long field and forest behind UD‘s house.

Inside this house are all the goods of interior existence, the sort of existence you lead when the exterior is unbearable. Meals are brought to the door. The air is chilled.

UD plays Purcell on the baby grand, and sings. Music for a while shall all your cares beguile.

Late afternoon, before night falls, UD cuts back her garden, rampant with hot sun and night storms. When, overheated, she reenters her house, it feels antarctic.

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

II

An Update

** UD has been invited to teach in India next year. She is looking into it.

** UD will speak about women and technology (in particular, MOOCs) at the next Modern Language Association convention, in Chicago.

Saturday, 11 January

651. Women in the Expanding University: Global and Local

5:15–6:30 p.m.

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession

Presiding: Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Speakers: Diana Elizabeth Henderson, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.; Teresa Mangum, Univ. of Iowa; Margaret Soltan, George Washington Univ.; Catharine Roslyn Stimpson, New York Univ.

Women are often at the center of debates about technological pedagogy. Taking women and the “expanding university” as our framework, we will address pedagogical strategies, forms of community engagement, and prospects for women’s activism offered by new technologies. This forum promises to open a space for critique of emerging technologies even as it identifies new avenues of innovation.

** UD was interviewed twice last week, first by a freelancer pitching a story about MOOCs to Poets & Writers, and then by a reporter at the Argus Leader. He’s doing a piece about a local dignitary who has a degree from a diploma mill. I’ll link to these articles when/if they appear.

… Second Amendment rights.

Let’s see… That was July 6, 2013, and today is July 18, 2013, and the head of Glaxo North America was telling the New York Times on July 6 that her company was definitely going to avoid the massive corruption (her dainty description of what Glaxo did wrong doesn’t quite cover the matter – unless you think three billion dollars in fines for failure to report the status of a couple of studies sounds about right) for which Glaxo has long been renowned.

And maybe Glaxo will avoid that form of corruption – I mean, the form that involves paying American university professors to put their names on bogus studies your advertising people have written and thereby endangering, well, basically endangering the entire population of the world… While ripping the world off to buy the drugs that will kill it…

Anyway, that was then. This is now, several days later, and now this humongous story about Glaxo using whores and bribes to take over the Chinese market is breaking all over the place, and I’m sure Glaxo is again shocked shocked that hundreds of millions of impoverished Chinese people are unable to afford medicine because the price of pills has been jacked up by Glaxo paying prescribing doctors to jack off.

“Each doctor had a credit card from the company. The kickbacks were transferred to the cards the day after drugs were prescribed,” [one] newspaper claimed.

[An investigator] said consumers were being defrauded. The official Xinhua news agency, which was given access to [a Glaxo executive] in detention, quoted him allegedly saying medicine that cost 30 yuan to make could be sold for 300 yuan.

The sums quoted by the police, if correct, suggest GSK was spending a significant proportion of its annual sales revenue on bribing doctors. In 2012, the company’s sales in China rose 17pc, to nearly £759m, from 2011, according to its annual report.

I wonder if Glaxo is also offering sexual relief to UCLA professors.

You know, lots of university professors are walking around with Glaxo in their name. Take this one, at today’s scandal-plagued darling, Rutgers University: Ah-Ng Tony Kong, Professor II and Glaxo Professor of Pharmaceutics. When does the name of a person (the Paterno Chair, the Ira Rennert Professor) or a company get so yucky you kind of think you might want to refuse it?

A company like Glaxo – could its vileness become so generally known that universities would begin turning down naming rights for their faculty?

Nah.

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

Update: The Yellow Peril made us do it!

We don’t do this sort of thing.

I don’t know. Just because it made me laugh out loud.

… Jerzy Soltan, shows up (painted) at 4:42 in this film about the Polish painter Wojciech Fangor. Les UDs have inherited some Fangor paintings (including a number of his famous circles). UD has great memories of summers in upstate New York at the Fangors’ farmhouse.

The excellent website culture.pl features a good biography of Woytek, as well as a series of photos of his work, him, and his wife Magda.

… à la chinoise.

University Diaries, I’ve had occasion to say, couldn’t exist without Yeshiva University. Yeshiva is part of a tiny American university elite, a group of schools so arrogant, so dishonest, so mismanaged, so inbred, so simply without a clue, that their unceasing scandals provide a good deal of this blog’s content.

Yeshiva, furthermore, is a religious institution, which makes its very bad behavior that much more astounding. To a man (there aren’t any women in positions of authority there), the Yeshiva representatives UD has experienced appear to her to be pious hypocrites.

Yeshiva’s latest catastrophe was totally expected. Let me quote in its entirety the short notice the Jewish Daily Forward just placed on its website.

Yeshiva University’s credit rating has been downgraded by a major ratings agency amid large and growing deficits, a falling endowment and fears of costly litigation stemming from recent allegations of sexual abuse at its high school.

Moody’s downgraded Y.U.’s debt from A2 to Baa1, putting it below the median credit rating for similar institutions.

The agency says that the litigation prospects of the alleged sexual abuse victims will largely determine if the debt is downgraded further.

Since its peak in 2007 Y.U.’s endowment has cratered, falling 45%, doing handily worse than the stock market. Y.U.’s reliance on hedge funds, in particular, has been extremely damaging. It was also slammed by the financial crisis and damaged by its entanglement with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scam.

Meanwhile, the federal lawsuit filed last week by former students at Y.U.’s affiliated high school, alleging administrative negligence in response to abuse they suffered there, is demanding over $380 million in damages. According to Moody’s the attendant publicity may have large consequences for Yeshiva’s fundraising efforts.

As a commenter on this notice writes, “the major damage to the YU bond ratings is not just because of the lawsuit, but because YU has probably lost the confidence of donors.” One Yeshiva donor, Andrew Sole, tried to warn Yeshiva as far back as five years ago. Read his letter calling for the resignation of the entire board of trustees here. The letter, it goes without saying, was ignored.

And note the word “entanglement” up there, relative to Bernard Madoff’s scheme. Madoff, you recall, was a high-ranking, much-venerated trustee of Yeshiva University up to the moment he was taken into custody. Ezra Merkin was also on the board of trustees at that time, working, in consort with Madoff, the sort of financial magic that has become the stuff of legend. Yeshiva tried to make itself out to be a victim of Madoff’s, but it was an enabler, it made plenty of money off of him while the making was good, and it looked the other way when anyone could see that Madoff’s returns were totally impossible.

“Moral bankruptcy,” Algemeiner newspaper said of Yeshiva University earlier this year. That moral bankruptcy has so disgusted donors that it threatens to become financial bankruptcy.

But can he? The problem with – call it the Squeak Assumption – is that, as economists remind us, one’s perception of one’s financial condition has everything to do with what other people in your immediate world earn.

A few years ago, several of Harvard’s money managers resigned in protest because instead of making the industry standard for their job description (with bonuses and all, around thirty million a year at that time), they were stuck (because of alumni protests about over-compensation) at around ten, fifteen million. A few years ago, a University of Chicago law professor with a household income of close to half a million dollars cried poor in the national press.

If Steven Cohen, whose personal worth is between eight and ten billion dollars, sits on your board of trustees, you, as president of Brown University, are going to be challenged to maintain your self-esteem. No one likes to be poor.

If you want to understand why the new president of Rutgers, Robert Barchi, is, like a total idiot, continuing to engage in flagrant, self-serving conflict of interest, and thereby adding one more outrageous scandal to the ten others going on at that university, you have to understand what I’m trying to tell you. You have to try to put yourself in Barchi’s shoes. In his corporate-board world, clearing one million dollars a year is the absolute minimum, the barest acceptable situation. One million dollars is in fact for Barchi squeaking by. If Barchi has to drop his corporate money-for-nothing and suddenly plummet to $800,000 a year, this is what his world will look like to him:

One walks along a very rough path of the river bank, in between clothes posts and washing lines, to reach a chaotic group of little, one-storied, one-roomed cabins. Most of them have earth floors, and working, living and sleeping all take place in the one room. In such a hole, barely six feet long and five wide, I saw two beds—and what beds and bedding!—which filled the room, except for the fireplace and doorstep. Several of these huts, as far as I could see, were completely empty, although the door was open and the inhabitants were leaning against the door posts. In front of the doors filth and garbage abounded. I could not see the pavement, but from time to time I felt it was there because my feet scraped it…

Unless you understand Barchi’s world, from Barchi’s perspective, you cannot possibly understand how he came to assume the presidency of a university barely recovering from years of financial corruption and immediately set about securing his corporate board memberships.

I suppose it’s some sort of compensation, when the story about your young, already totally blighted university presidency jumps to the New York Times, that the quality of prose being produced about the fiasco significantly improves – even to the point of poetry. Rutgers has moved from storm to storm is lovely, lilting, memorable writing; even as the article in the Times rehearses all the stupid stuff Robert Barchi has overseen in the months since he took over at Rutgers, it sweetens things somehow with this poignant formulation…

UD thinks the poetry resides in the word moved… Think of the similar E.E. Cummings line

my father moved through dooms of love

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

Perhaps, as John Updike wrote, life’s a shabby subterfuge; certainly the last few years at Rutgers and the UMDNJ have been shabby in the extreme. Under its latest leader, a man who does not even understand the concept of conflict of interest, Rutgers straggles on. And the rain it raineth every day.

La Kid, Tower of London.

July 10, 2013.

Context matters. If you’re the new president of a crime- and scandal-ridden university, you want to watch yourself. Given the scuzzy reputation of the joint, you want to do all you can, personally, to model a new, less scuzzy ethos.

So for instance if you’ve just taken over the notorious University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, a school UD has long described as having rolling prison admissions (scroll down and enjoy), you want to set a personal example of probity and non-greed and all the things UMDNJ has never before known.

You’ve taken over America’s most financially corrupt university as part of its recent merger with Rutgers University. And oh yeah that’s another thing. If at Rutgers you’re running a national laughingstock (thanks to endless sports scandals culminating in a Saturday Night Live skit about your sadistic basketball coach — again, scroll down… forever…) and a fiscal disgrace (thanks to your bankrupting the school to pay for your sports program), you really, really, really want to set a moral example as you begin to run the school.

But hey. It’s Jersey. Whaddya expect? You expect a president who can be content with his legitimate close-to-a-million-dollars-a-year salary? It’s fucking Jersey!

“It smells to high hell quite frankly,” said Jay W. Lorsch, a professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on corporate governance.

Yeah! The place stinks already; how ’bout bringing your own stink bombs to the game? President Barchi’s particular stink bombs are of course all about sitting on corporate boards – as the New York Times points out in this article, it’s the done thing if you’re a university president panting to make (as the title of a recent book about the practice has it) money for nothing. And Barchi adds an extra jolt of stink by sitting on the boards of companies who do business with Rutgers.

What with perennially expensive sports scandals, and a sports program that in any case is bankrupting the school, you won’t be surprised to hear that tuition at Rutgers is so high that student protests escalate by the day. It can only make things better for students to realize that instead of running the school Barchi is off to relax-and-rejuvenate corporate retreats. What better way for the president of a struggling, scandal-ridden, public university to comport himself?

[University of New Mexico] Athletic Director Paul Krebs said the business model for the rebuild of The Pit two years ago, which cost about $45 million, was “predicated on a naming gift for The Pit.”

Apparently the Pit, UNM’s basketball arena, actually cost 60 rather than 45 million, but I guess the cost was predicated on being 45 million… Just like the renovation itself was predicated on a rich person offering 10 million dollars so that this person’s family or business name would be on the stadium…

Unlike Florida Atlantic University, which did score a rich namer (a local prison company) for its stadium (whoops – FAU had to turn down the gift because of outrage over the perceived sleaziness of that prison business… FAU’s disgraced president resigned… and since then, no other namer has come forward, so the school is hemorrhaging money…), UNM hasn’t gotten one bite. Even though it spent 60 million dollars on the basis of a promise – a predication – that a naming gift would be forthcoming.

No problem, however. Tuition and fees will rise, and faculty salaries will remain flat, so that this unpredicated outcome can be handled.

Luckily, UNM students and faculty are accustomed to the peculiarly expensive nothingness of la vie UNM. They’re already paying for an empty baseball stadium. There are all sorts of ongoing monetary and other costs related to the latest batch of unpleasant coaching departures (Alford, Locksley). Everyone at UNM seems willing to remain eternally poor and stupid — predicated on sports.

… overlooked.  Brain injury, drunk driving, gun-play — the sorts of activities significant numbers of high-profile-sports student athletes engage in — these things get less attention than bogus courses and friends with impermissible benefits, etc.

UD isn’t sure why, given the obviously greater drama of that first list… Maybe it’s because some of that stuff hasn’t happened yet, as it were (eventually some players will probably die of football-inflicted brain injuries…), and while the other stuff (drunk driving, gun-play) does happen here and now  it usually  doesn’t end up actually killing anyone.   Plus millions of Americans play with their guns and get drunk and get into fights and all.  Big deal.

The other stuff, the academic stuff, can have all sorts of NCAA implications, which can hurt team performance, etc.  It can hurt eligibility.

Thus Luke DeCock, a Kansas City  Star writer, notes how bizarre it is that the latest fuckup on a University of North Carolina sports team is in trouble for hanging out with a professional agent and possibly taking gifts from him and all, but no one seems to care that a gun was found just outside the car he was driving when he was recently arrested.

Drive around with a 9 mm handgun and nine rounds of ammunition … and you’re asking for real trouble. That was also found outside Hairston’s car, and while the police said Wednesday they don’t anticipate any additional charges against Hairston, there’s still no explanation for the gun. That’s the really worrying thing about this entire episode.

NCAA violations very rarely put lives at risk. Guns kill.

There have been 14 homicides in Durham in 2013 already. It’s an unchecked epidemic of violence, too much of it taking place in the same neighborhood where Hairston and his friends were arrested.

As DeCock writes:

Not to be deliberately obtuse, but while rental cars and parking tickets have added a whiff of conspiracy to P.J. Hairston’s troubles, isn’t the bigger issue that a gun was found outside the car the North Carolina basketball star was driving when he was arrested?

 

Apparently it’s being obtuse to believe that the weaponry student athletes are carting around is more disturbing than the mysterious Yukon SUVs they’re driving. I mean, unavoidable bottom line here seems to be that we don’t much care whether they kill themselves or even us; we care that their team remains eligible.

I think this is how you get to Aaron Hernandez.

… a West Virginia newspaper.

It begins with a July 6 letter from good ol’ Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University (background on Marshall here) in the ‘nineties. Wade went on to head the University of Tennessee but had to leave onaccounta he did a few things that seem like they didn’t sit well with other people there. Yeah, ol’ Wade had to scoot.

Now Wade’s letter is a model of its type. What you got here is the good ol’ boy reminiscing bout the good ol’ days when men was men and Marshall was a beautiful paradise of football, football, and football.

I … remember being invited to a national meeting of 20 university presidents and 20 Fortune 500 corporate CEOS in the late 1990s and hearing many positive remarks about Marshall. In fact, Father Malloy, the president of Notre Dame at that time, approached me at a reception and said, “Wade, some of us were just talking about the success of your football program and we were wondering just how it happened.”

And that’s just one story about rich important people flocking around me wanting to know my secret of success!

After sharing more stories about how fantastic football is for universities, Wade concludes:

And there is no doubt that football, which is largely self-supporting, has been and will be a positive factor in promoting Marshall’s national image.

A little nay-saying (“Self-supporting? Hardly.”) does pop up among the commenters, but a July 13 opinion piece from a Marshall finance professor really puts the kibosh on the thing. Dallas Brozik is a hard-nosed guy and he ain’t having any of it.

Despite the fact that one of his students, on Rate My Professors, says Dallas doesn’t like English majors, Dallas writes really well. Let’s see how he does it, step by step. Scathing Online Schoolmarm will interrupt his piece with comments in parenthesis.

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

Wade Gilley’s recent letter concerning the ongoing discussion about the Marshall University budget was quite interesting. [Now usually SOS complains about the profoundly uninteresting word interesting. But Dallas here’s going to use it slyly, in the manner of Oscar Wilde…] Just as a magician uses sleight of hand to mislead the audience, those who wish to keep the university budget a black hole keep spreading misinformation.

I have no doubt [Brozik will repeat the formulation I have no doubt throughout his piece.]   that Dr. Gilley met with folks at all levels who commented on our football team, which at the time had a winning record. Sports always makes good small talk. I have no doubt that we had the best athletes and coaches despite the legal and criminal records of some of these individuals.  [Note how slyly Brozik has already gotten two points across:  Gilley’s a maundering fool; and the teams he’s teary-eyed about were pretty smelly.]

I have no doubt that Dr. Gilley met a person whose daughter had chosen to go to law school at a certain university, supposedly because of the school’s athletic program. I also have no doubt that I would not want this person to represent me in a court of law unless it is about sports law.  [Brozik’s calm, reiterated I have no doubt is wonderful.  It signals a kind of elaborate emotional self-control, a determination to be gentlemanly and long-suffering about Gilley.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been an important factor in the increase in enrollment at Marshall. Dr. Stephen Kopp became president on July 1, 2005. For the academic year 2005-2006, the official enrollment of the university was 13,920. The official enrollment for 2012-2013 was 13,708. This implies that the football program, or whatever, created negative enrollment growth.  [Oh, don’t confuse me with numbers!  And that or whatever is wonderful too  – another sly polite little suggestion that Wade is somewhat whacked out.]

Dr. Gilley has no doubt that the football program has been a very positive economic growth factor for Huntington. Since Dr. Gilley’s time, the population of Huntington has decreased and many businesses have closed. The 2012 State of Well-Being Report from Gallup-Healthways ranks Huntington as 188 out of 189. Check the want ads section of today’s paper to see how many job openings exist and at what levels. There has been no economic miracle in Huntington over the last several decades, football or not. [You can see ol’ Wade putting a hand over each ear at this point and saying LALALALALA I can’t hear you I can’t hear you…]

Wade Gilley left Marshall under his own cloud [We won’t even go into his University of Tennessee cloud.]; why he wants to get involved in this discussion is strange. He has no dog in this fight. He is old news. He admits he has little insight into the current budget situation, but he has no doubt that a football program which is not self-supporting promotes Marshall’s national image. Dr. Gilley is entitled to his opinion, but opinions are like bellybuttons; everybody has one but very few should be aired in public.  [SOS would drop the way down-home belly button thing.  Brozik doesn’t need it; and it breaks his terrific tone of restrained contempt.]

Dr. Kopp promised “transparency” in April.  [Only in his last paragraph does Brozik turn to Marshall’s current football-concussed president.  Nice move.  It puts MU’s latest loser squarely in the company of Gilley.]  He still has not opened the books for review, even though state law requires him to do so. The current problem is one of accountability for state funds and the tuition and fees paid by students. Those who try to frame this as an anti-sports question are either misled or trying to be misleading. The budget for Marshall University is important to the entire community, and that budget should be examined. The time for opinions is over. It is time for action. It is time for Dr. Kopp to live up to his promise of transparency and open the books.

… being scammed.”