… a sample of his great prose, and some words about why it’s great.

This is from Herzog, the book UD considers by far his best.

Moses Herzog, an urban American intellectual in his forties, is having a slow-motion nervous breakdown as his personal life falls apart. Here he’s in Chicago on a hot day, getting into his car to take his young daughter (who lives with his about-to-be-ex-wife and the man with whom she was unfaithful to Herzog) to visit an aquarium.

He had an extraordinary number of keys, by now, and must organize them better in his pockets. There were his New York house keys, the key Ramona had given him, the Faculty Men’s Lounge key from the university, and the key to Asphalter’s apartment, as well as several Ludeyville keys. “You must sit in the back seat, honey. Creep in now, and pull down your dress because the plastic is very hot.” The air from the west was drier than the east air. Herzog’s sharp senses detected the difference. In these days of near-delerium and wide-ranging disordered thought, deeper currents of feeling had heightened his perceptions, or made him instill something of his own into his surroundings. As though he painted them with moisture and color taken from his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals. In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago, familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he created his version of it. Where the thick walls and buckled slabs of pavement in the Negro slums exhaled their bad smells. Farther west, the industries; the sluggish South Branch, dense with sewage and glittering with a crust of golden slime; the Stockyards, deserted; the tall red slaughterhouses in lonely decay; and then a faintly buzzing dullness of bungalows and scrawny parks; and vast shopping centers; and the cemeteries after these – Waldheim, with its graves for Herzogs past and present; the Forest Preserves for riding parties; Croatian picnics, lovers’ lanes, horrible murders; airports; quarries; and, last of all, cornfields. And with this, infinite forms of activity – Reality. Moses had to see reality. Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace. Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business. Vigilance. If he borrowed time to take his tiny daughter to see the fishes he would find a way to make it up to the vigilance-fund. This day was just like – he braced himself and faced it – like the day of Father’ Herzog’s funeral. Then too, it was flowering weather – roses, magnolias. Moses, the night before, had cried, slept, the air was wickedly perfumed; he had had luxuriant dreams, painful, evil, and rich, interrupted by the rare ecstasy of nocturnal emission – how death dangles freedom before the enslaved instincts: the pitiful sons of Adam whose minds and bodies must answer strange signals. Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas.

Let’s analyze this paragraph. My comments are in parenthesis, in blue.

He had an extraordinary number of keys, by now, and must organize them better in his pockets. [Ends on his strongest word – pockets – and a word tonally at odds with the other words in the sentence. It kind of pops out sharply – pockets – at the end of a sentence that has been mainly about mushy words. This little wake-up, this little satori, at the end of the sentence, rouses us for the next sentence, subliminally leads us to expect an intensification or deepening or emotionalizing of the idea of personal disorder. The keys, we must be led to understand – but led at the same time as Herzog himself is led to understand, since it’s the motion of his consciousness moving unsteadily toward difficult truths that we’re following in real time – symbolize Herzog’s inner deterioration, his having lost the key to existence. We must grasp this subtly, incompletely, obliquely, as a particularly defensive and clotted human consciousness grasps it. Note, then, how his prose will accomplish this feat.] There were his New York house keys, the key Ramona had given him, the Faculty Men’s Lounge key from the university, and the key to Asphalter’s apartment, as well as several Ludeyville keys. [Attempting to organize himself mentally, Herzog first simply lists the keys and their provenances; this is a familiar mental game we all play, pulling our thoughts together by identifying things, listing things. Formally, it’s also a clever move, since this list serves as a kind of summary of the plot so far, reminding the readers about the scenes and characters we’ve encountered.] “You must sit in the back seat, honey. Creep in now, and pull down your dress because the plastic is very hot.” [Bellow will interrupt his stream of consciousness with the intrusive facts of immediate social reality. His character has not fallen so far that he’s psychotic, unable to register and assimilate external event. Yet the narrative back and forth between long involved paragraphs of thought, memory, reasoning, and sudden brief flashes from the outside world conveys the difficulty Herzog’s having negotiating his oppressed and trying-to-puzzle-it-out consciousness and the simple fact of other people and a daily social life.] The air from the west was drier than the east air. [Note that this very simple, essentially monosyllabic sentence will be followed by a series of more and more complex sentences as Herzog gradually transitions from the outer world – he has just said something to his daughter – to his much more engrossing inner world.] Herzog’s sharp senses detected the difference. [All of Bellow’s books are about the effort to intensify consciousness, to apprehend the truth of the natural, the human, and the divine. He has endowed Herzog with the same hypersensitive awareness he gives most of his protagonists, an awareness at once the glory of humanity – our insight and lucidity are amazing, our distinguishing power – and – at least for people like Herzog – our doom. For Herzog is debilitatingly self-conscious, a comic figure asking for more illumination than his human mind can yield. His wife in fact has left him for an idiot, but a big happy lusty idiot.] In these days of near-delerium and wide-ranging disordered thought, deeper currents of feeling had heightened his perceptions, or made him instill something of his own into his surroundings. [Note by the way the indirect discourse technique Bellow has adopted here. We’re clearly in the mind of Herzog, but things are being rendered in third-person. But notice also, later in this passage, that we will slip out of third into first-person. Bellow learned this technique – and so much else – from James Joyce’s Ulysses. He even got his hero’s name – Moses Herzog – from a minor character in Ulysses. Moving always from third to first back to third, etc., is a way of registering not only our restless consciousness, but the way we shift from regarding ourselves with a certain neutral objectivity to often simply being enmeshed in a direct and not particularly reflective way in the ongoing business of being us. And this idea of instilling oneself into one’s surroundings — isn’t that the way we perceive and encounter and lend meaning to the world? We interpret it as a projection of our consciousness; we shade each external object with our particular internal emotional condition, our inner coloration. Thus, for instance, Wallace Stevens in “Sunday Morning” talks about passions of rain.] As though he painted them with moisture and color taken from his own mouth, his blood, liver, bowels, genitals. [This bizarre sentence and idea is one mark of the great writer. It has an almost repellent anatomical literalness, a grotesque and off-putting oddness. And yet this sentence has an important function in the evolving consciousness of this passage, moving us yet closer to the disordered, suffering, vulnerable existential state of Herzog. He is becoming naked in this passage, exposed, just as his mental illness, if you will, involves the destruction of his privacy, defenses, self-control, self-respect. He has been laid bare by misfortune. It’s like Prufrock:

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall…

When very bad things happen to you, suddenly everyone can see you. It’s one of the many indignities of misfortune: There it is in all its glory for the world to see: Your weakness, your failure.]

In this mingled way, therefore, he was aware of Chicago, [Note that words like extraordinary and therefore mark what’s left of Herzog’s intellectual orientation. His impressive reasoning mind is being overtaken by emotional chaos, but this language marks his effort to keep analytical dispassion alive. Thus we remain in the third-person for this; only when he’s at his most naked will Herzog move into first-person.] familiar ground to him for more than thirty years. And out of its elements, by this peculiar art of his own organs, he created his version of it. [Creating your version of the world is knowing it the only way we can know it; it is marking it with our consciousness in the way a dog marks his territory, makes it his.] Where the thick walls and buckled slabs of pavement in the Negro slums exhaled their bad smells. [Note that assonance: walls/buckled/slabs/slums/exhaled/smells. Notice buckled and slums. Notice slabs/slums/smells. All of it gives poetry, of all things, to this sort of description, and thereby – since it is Herzog’s poetry – gives his consciousness individuality, romance.] Farther west, the industries; the sluggish South Branch, dense with sewage and glittering with a crust of golden slime; the Stockyards, deserted; the tall red slaughterhouses in lonely decay; and then a faintly buzzing dullness of bungalows and scrawny parks; and vast shopping centers; and the cemeteries after these – Waldheim, with its graves for Herzogs past and present; the Forest Preserves for riding parties; Croatian picnics, lovers’ lanes, horrible murders; airports; quarries; and, last of all, cornfields. [You see how we’ve gone from that earlier short monosyllabic sentence to this massive list, this amazing and still-romantic rendering of Chicago? And see how he’s kept his degraded/glorious contradiction going? Glittering, golden, vast, lovers… We could take these words and make this place a Wordsworthian delight. But also sluggish – see how sluggish picks up and extends the slabs/slums/smells series? – and crust, decay, scrawny, murders… See too how subtly Herzog personalizes this passage, reminding the reader of his particular losses and the way they mark the city’s land – the graves of Herzogs. Notice above all at this point how much Bellow is juggling: The immediate present of his daughter, the drive to the aquarium; his rageful, troubled consciousness; his analytical, truth-seeking consciousness; his personal coloration/interpretation of the city and larger world; his reckoning with his past and with death…] And with this, infinite forms of activity – Reality. Moses had to see reality. [By now, you’re picking up on Bellow’s constant poetic shaping of his language: all of those short i’s: with, this, infinite, activity, reality.] Perhaps he was somewhat spared from it so that he might see it better, not fall asleep in its thick embrace. [A recurrent theme in Herzog is the character’s privileged American immunity from real suffering — physical suffering, the suffering of poverty, the sort of suffering so comprehensive as to make it impossible to take that analytical step backward and see reality.] Awareness was his work; extended consciousness was his line, his business. [I think we are meant to smile at this as a species of delusion, arrogance. Bellow always described Herzog as a comic send-up of intellectual arrogance. Here we have a man, Moses Herzog, exceptionally intellectually gifted and yet living one of the stupidest lives imaginable. His big brain isn’t doing him any good. Arguably it’s making things worse.] Vigilance. If he borrowed time to take his tiny daughter to see the fishes he would find a way to make it up to the vigilance-fund. [Vigilance-fund signals the truth of what I just wrote. This is Herzog self-aware enough to satirize his endeavor.] This day was just like – he braced himself and faced it – like the day of Father’ Herzog’s funeral. [Okay and note: No paragraph break as we switch to this family theme. This is stream of consciousness. Also, it’s not as if we haven’t been prepared for what will now be a memory of and meditation on death, and the weird relationship of the living to the dead. Already his family cemetery has been mentioned.] Then too, it was flowering weather – roses, magnolias. [Herzog heads into his memory of the day of his father’s funeral. Like everyone, he moves, consciousness-wise, via associations. The particular spring weather this day has prompted thoughts of the same weather that day. And again the poetry: roses, magnolias. To his other conflicts in this passage we can add the conflict of death on a day of intense flowering life.] Moses, the night before, had cried, slept, the air was wickedly perfumed; he had had luxuriant dreams, painful, evil, and rich, interrupted by the rare ecstasy of nocturnal emission – how death dangles freedom before the enslaved instincts: the pitiful sons of Adam whose minds and bodies must answer strange signals. Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. [Cool, huh? Start with the end: Of course now we get one of our forays into first person: Most of MY life… Having really stripped himself as this passage concludes, Herzog has nowhere else to go but to the “pitiful” fact of his own particular fleshly, enslaved self. This passage has taken us from the heights of rational consideration of the world to the nighttime depths of one vulnerable infantilized weeping utterly overcome slob. The air was wickedly perfumed; his dreams were evil. The obscene grotesquerie of his father’s death inspiring in Herzog not noble philosophical despair but ecstatic sexual liberation so strong as to inspire a wet dream — what are we to do with this? These are incoherent ideas, incoherent feelings – one’s beloved father’s death as a seductive spectacle of freedom? – and then this absurd final sentence, written as if part of a grant application:

Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas.

So – nothing new here. Like all of us, Herzog is torn between instinct and reason, his animal and higher nature. This passage puts us right into the seriousness, pathos and comedy of that grappling. It reminds us (the dreams, the nocturnal emission) just how enslaved our instincts are, and how elusive the keys (you remember the keys) to ourselves and to the world.]

When you get a wild and crazy sentence like this, a truly mad mix of metaphors, you perceive the intriguing connection between lazy cliche and hyperactive metaphor. Let’s first look at this remarkable sentence more closely. I’ll highlight its images.

Though skyrocketing tuitions and a growing anti-government tide are seemingly swimming against traditional university education, the true educational bubble forming is in the online space.

We set out here with skyrockets in flight. The rockets are up in the air with a tide. Together the rocket and the tide appear to be swimming. The actual mixed water and air action, however, is a space bubble.

Are you trying to picture this? To make the picture make sense? That tends to be how we read – we’re not only reading for an argument; we’re enriching our sense of the emotional and intellectual meaning of the writer’s claims by assimilating his various figures into our reactions, by allowing his images to ground and dramatize what might otherwise be mere abstract statement. But excess and confused figures – coupled here with modifier-madness (skyrocketing, growing, seemingly, traditional, true, online – no noun is left unaccosted) – just produce a confused mess. They make thinking harder, not simpler. And they tend to happen when your argument is little more than a string of cliches. Here are some, from this Forbes piece.

… [C]ollege students tune out during their four years on campus; that, or they memorize what’s needed to get As on the tests… [T]eens go to college with an eye on a fun four years, after which they hope the school they attend will open doors for a good job… [W]hat’s learned in college is irrelevant to what’s done in the real world. … [C]ollege is not about learning much as we might wish it were… [W]hen parents spend a fortune on their children’s schooling they’re not buying education; rather they’re buying the ‘right’ friends for them, the right contacts for the future, access to the right husbands and wives, not to mention buying their own (“Our son goes to Williams College”) status. …Parents and kids … aren’t buying education despite their protests to the contrary. Going to college is a status thing, not a learning thing. Kids go to college for the experience, not for what’s taught.

Note how a weak argument full of overstatement relies on a repeated pounding of the reader by means of cliche. It should not surprise us when a robotic redundancy insisting that American university education represents status obsessives and their bad seed eventually produces nutty sentences like this one.

… “This is a university. This is a university.”

Again, as you read this update, repeat: This is a university. This is a university.

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

Emory at first did nothing about complaints directed at [Charles] Nemeroff, but in the aftermath of intense political pressure from the United States Senate, and from Senator Chuck Grassley in particular, he was subsequently stripped of his department chairmanship and forbidden from accepting more drug company largess. He soon left the university. Not to worry, though; he has since resurfaced as chair of psychiatry at the University of Miami.

This is a university.

This is a university.

The University of Hawaii has it all; and its last president just gave up – years before her contract’s end – in the face of it. Now UH’s clueless trustees will spend months and lots of money trying to come up with an interim president and then a (cough) non-interim one…

A common theme at Thursday’s meeting was that the university needs to return its attention to students.

Now there’s an idea!

One trustee pointed to “abysmal graduation rates.” Enrollment’s declining on virtually all campuses. Over the last eleven years, tuition has gone up 141%. Much of the money seems to have gone to administrators.

Regent Jeffrey Acido, the board’s sole student member, also stressed that the university lacks a culture in which students feel committed to the school and its mission.

Now a Ph.D. student in his 10th year at UH, Acido said that he’s regularly had professors tell him to leave the university because of Hawaii’s dismal job prospects or because he has greater academic opportunities elsewhere.

“It kind of hurts because I believe in this institution, but (the university needs) to cultivate a culture in which you breed amazing students with faculty that encourage you to stay and not leave,” he said.

He recalled visiting campuses such as the University of California at Berkeley or Harvard, campuses at which he felt that “culture of commitment.”

“But I don’t stand toe to toe with them,” he said. “That culture has to expand. That culture has to multiply.”

It’s odd that Acido has been hanging around UH for ten years; but put that aside. He has detected the problem, the fundamental cause of all the UH embarrassments UD has chronicled on this blog. (Put Hawaii in my search engine for details.) But what he’s calling for – a setting of intellectual seriousness – is unlikely to emerge at UH. Hawaii’s one of those states – like Nevada, Montana, and South Carolina – with a toxic mix of anti-intellectualism and corruption. To make matters worse for Hawaii, it is, like Alaska (another state with terrible universities), much too far from the mainland for any of us to pay attention or care. Hawaii is doomed – university-wise – and would therefore do best to appoint a total insider its next president. Someone who will leave it alone to continue stewing in its own juices.

… but their tendency toward insularity and self-regard is easy to satirize. By definition, they must be small lest admission cease to be an honor; but this very smallness – and the always somewhat obscure (and to some extent corruptible) business of how one gets in – represents a danger.

Todd Wallack, an enterprising Boston Globe reporter, broke the story of Lesley Cohen Berlowitz’s apparent fake credentials, as well as her very real obscene salary and perks as head of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She handles a tiny staff and budget and makes more than most university presidents.

Now the Massachusetts attorney general is looking into the matter (a law firm is already on the case), and of course I’ve already talked about the hydra-headed nature of almost all organizations — even small ones. So we can expect a Berlowitz blow-out pretty soon, in which rumors about her bullying of staff, use of a limo for the short trip between the AAAS and her apartment, etc., etc., are confirmed…

Looking ahead, we can also see that the AAAS will go from invisible (Les UD’s own a house fifty yards from the AAAS and knew virtually nothing about it) to notorious in the public eye. Notorious and ridiculous.

… mention athletics.

It’s by Paul Campos. An excerpt:

[W]hat exactly is [all the money Gee raised] supposed to be for? In theory, of course, it’s for “education.” In practice, a whole lot of it goes directly into the pockets of a metastasizing cadre of university administrators, whose jobs, as nearly as I’ve been able to determine after being on a research university’s faculty for nearly a quarter century, consist of inventing justifications for their own existence, while harassing faculty to fill out evaluations of various kinds (In a particularly Kafkaesque twist, many of these evaluations are supposed to be of the administrators’ own job performance).

In Gee’s own case, the sums of money involved are disgusting. At the time he was apparently forced out after having made a few tactless jokes in a private meeting, Gee was getting paid about two million dollars per year. This does not include the $7.7 million that the university paid for Gee’s travel, housing and entertainment between 2007 and 2012 – a sum which included at least $895,000 for soirees at Gee’s university-provided mansion, more than a half million dollars for private jet travel, and “$64,000 on his trademark bow ties, bow tie cookies, O-H lapel pins and bow tie pins for university marketing.”

… Universities are not businesses, and university presidents are not CEOs. These institutions exist for reasons other than to maximize their revenues and enrich their management class. That it is even necessary to point this out illustrates the extent to which we have allowed the mentality of what investment bankers call “the market” to invade every aspect of American culture.

Nice ambiguity there, huh? To what does “they,” in Joe Nocera’s sentence refer? The teams or the universities?

I guess he means it to refer to the teams; but, if so, should he not at least have reversed the order – between the universities and the teams, and stop pretending they have any ‘educational’ value (and why put educational in quotation marks?)? Nocera presumably believes some universities have either educational or ‘educational’ value…

Consider too the content of his claim. Nocera’s one of many writers who, faced with the superscummy world big-time athletics has brought to America’s universities, urges that we “create some real separation” between athletics and universities.

Easy to say, Joe. What the fuck, pray tell, might you mean? When two people who can’t stand each other but find themselves married decide to really deal with that, they separate. Real separation means you live in different places and have little to nothing to do with one another. But I doubt Joe has in mind this clean a break.

I mean, plenty of people are calling for universities whose campuses are routinely trashed — literally and figuratively — by their sports programs to spin them off, to have a merely symbolic association with a local professional team that continues to carry the name of the university. That’s one way to go. But there are many more people, like Nocera, who seem to think that universities and big-time sports can be separated and yet reconciled, can have broken up and still live together under the same roof.

There are many reasons why this is impossible, prominent among them the simple dynamism of the phenomenon itself: Every year, unstoppably, scandals get more lurid, more expensive, more absolutely disgusting. Every year, coaches and players get more out of control, gain more power. Every year, the shreds of academic integrity these schools have managed to maintain shred yet more. Every year, more and more classes are cancelled to make way for games and for the dictates of the media conglomerates that now run the university show. Etc. Nocera’s column happens to be about university presidents destroyed by their athletic programs, but that’s only one of countless corruptions intrinsic to the decision to import professional sports — whose even more repulsive scandals (the latest being baseball boys and their steroids) Americans really seem to get off on — to universities. So you can put the smell over there, as it were, but it’s always going to work its way deep into your nostrils.

And I’m afraid absolute separation won’t fly either. I mean the idea of spinning off the teams, professionalizing them, but keeping University of Georgia in their name. Let me explain why.

Think of alum fandom as a delicate and nuanced perfume. It has a note of nostalgia, a bouquet of beer, a hint of hazing… studded about with the scent of sorority and the fragrance of frat. Alum fans are connected to their team through memories of sadistic initiation rituals, drunken stumbles into lakes, and other cherished keepsakes. Pack up the team and send it across town and you rip those memories from their moorings. Won’t work.

College hijinks, people!

Just like over in Richmond.

Florida Atlantic University, a laughingstock, seems to have decided to do what it can to make itself less ridiculous.

Seriousness and tax exemption – the two essentials of our universities – are closely aligned. If the first (the philosophical foundation) vanishes, the second (the financial foundation) will be imperiled. If any particular enterprise with university in its name loses its seriousness, as expressed in a scholarly atmosphere, a liberal arts curriculum, and the training of students for higher study and for jobs, state legislatures and citizens will begin to question the special forms of financial support (there are many besides tax exemption, of course; tax exemption is shorthand for them all) they are providing. Politicians will appropriate less and less money; alumni will offer fewer and fewer donations. Eventually, for the worst among our universities, students will stop applying, which is already happening at South Carolina State University and elsewhere.

Simply put, if it’s impossible to detect more than a token amount of academic activity on a university campus – if the place is not serious – people are eventually going to withhold the designation university from that campus, and the money benefits that sustain it are also going to be withheld.

Thus when Holden Thorp, sports-battered ex-chancellor of the University of North Carolina, says

“Either we put the ADs back in charge and hold them accountable if things don’t work […] or let’s be honest and tell everyone when we select (presidents) to run institutions that run big-time sports that athletics is the most important part of their job.”

he is warning American universities that they are running out of seriousness. He is signalling to all of our schools that the management of sports events – and the management of their attendant activities (crimes committed by athletes; destruction caused by drunken tailgaters; constant buyout and other lawsuits running into the hundreds of millions of dollars; endemic cheating; deals with distilleries for the sale of alcohol to students; ceaseless scandals costing the school millions in damage control and personnel replacement, etc.) – has become virtually the entire job of the university president. But this group of activities does not describe a university president. It describes an athletic director. The person who manages the dispensing of fifty million dollars – the amount of money the Sandusky scandal has so far cost Penn State – to lawyers and public relations people is not – and, as Thorp makes clear, should not be – a university president.

This person should, of course, be an athletic director. Eventually, many American universities will have athletic director presidents – people who manage sports, and also manage, in their spare time, whatever few academic issues crop up.

Having athletic directors as university presidents makes all kind of sense. The UNC scandal wouldn’t have happened at all if an AD had been president, since academic misconduct from the point of view of an AD is… what? What is that? The AD doesn’t even know what it is, so whatever happened in the Afro-American Studies department at Chapel Hill is … whatever. Price of doing business. Way to stay in the game. Once the AD has real control over what goes on in the school, scandals won’t surface because they won’t be scandals.

Under the President Athletic Director regime everyone will be happy.

But this bliss cannot last. Eventually more and more people will realize you’re not a university, and you’ll have to take that word out of your name and get your funding from ticket sales.

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

Meanwhile more and more schools at the moment have a Gordon Gee situation on their hands. Gee was a puppet intellectual (bow ties, spectacles) trotted out to mouth serious things, to keep the seriousness ball in the air.

Ever wonder why Gordon says such crazy shit? Babe, you don’t need a Freudian to know which way the wind blows. This is an angry puppet, a self-hating hypocrite, a man who used to have intellectual self-respect and now trades it every day for football money. Gordon Gee is a stage in the devolution of the American university president, a halfway point between mind and body, seriousness and play. His extinction will pave the way for President Nick Saban.

… talks himself out of a job.

… be my guest. I’ve spent most of the day admiring it.

Les UDs have what they always considered a posh neighbor across the street from their Shady Hill Square house in Cambridge. Fifty yards from their ivied walls lies the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a rather vague outfit to both UDs, but one they feel sure does good and high-minded things.

I don’t know why neither of us has ever had any interest in figuring out just what the AAAS does. Talking about it now, we were able to eke out a memory that the AAAS publishes the journal Daedalus, and that our long-ago neighbor and friend John Kenneth Galbraith was a member (we think). I’ve always been pleased that their rather small building in a large park keeps the view in that direction green and leafy…

All very nice, you say. And yet — who knows what evil lurks at Irving and Beacon Streets? A reader sends UD (UD thanks her reader) this scathing article from the Boston Globe, detailing an organization whose leader lied about having earned a doctorate (a lie that continues to help her get federal funds), makes an unconscionable salary (almost $600,000) for the head of a very small non-profit, and “requires workers to chauffeur her between the office and her luxury apartment along the Charles River in Cambridge.” (Back in 2003, the Globe had already taken notice of this woman.)

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

Now if your problem is that you’re perceived as high-handed and out of touch, how do you deal with that?

Well, you instruct one of your underlings to instruct reporters that they are to report to your expensive public relations person who will condescend to say the following:

“Neither the academy nor President Berlowitz is going to respond to subjective, interpretive, and gossipy allegations from former employees and unnamed sources. …Nor are they going to respond to personal questions that are irrelevant, do not belong in the public ­domain and, frankly, smack of sexism.”

Wow! Winner! Touched all the bases there. Advised her not to speak directly to the press. Not even to answer the phone, a job for subordinates. Announced that James Devitt, NYU spokesman who looked at that school’s records in regard to President Berlowitz, is just a mean ol’ stupid ol’ gossip. Plus you’re all sexists!

All UD can say is, next time I see the Berlowitz limo whizzing by I’m gonna let out a Bronx cheer loud enough for her to hear and tell her to move the hell out. She’s lowering the tone of the place.

Ah, once again all good flows from big-time university athletics. Here it’s the University of Montana, some of whose professors wonder why the school has a devastating $8.6 million deficit.

The deficit may have something to do with all the rape in Missoula, some of it apparently committed by football players. When your city is known as the Rape Capital of America, people might be reluctant to spend much time there; and indeed the main reason for UM’s deficit involves a sharp downturn in enrolled students.

The UM professors who signed the opinion piece note a looming event sure to make UM as unattractive to new faculty as it is to new students.

Most recently, the university attempted to put a positive spin on the investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice into how the university handled allegations of sexual assault. The administration claimed it had achieved a great victory by reaching an agreement with this federal agency. A closer look, however, reveals that UM, in a desperate effort to avoid another embarrassment, negotiated a legal settlement that forced it to accept all the recommendations and demands made by the federal government. Among these were a series of mandatory training programs which the administration promised to implement across campus. UM leadership must understand that training of faculty should be limited to procedural matters and cannot be used as a pretext to alter the curriculum, impose ideological positions, and threaten the fundamental academic freedoms of the faculty.

You see, because athletes at the university were sexually abusive, faculty will be forced to take Don’t Rape Your Students training sessions.

As I say, great and manifold is the goodness flowing from big-time university athletics.

… always puts you in awkward positions.

In response to Fadela Amara’s recent talk at the University of Chicago (background here), a UC student (who didn’t attend) writes:

For the far-right, it is a matter of marginalizing an undesirable religious group, and for people of Amara’s ilk, it is a matter of imposing their views of freedom and liberty in a manner that undermines those very principles.

One always hears this. Despite the fact that in France, for instance, 82 percent of the electorate supported the burqa ban (the French Senate approved it 246 to 1), one is always informed that opposition to the burqa means one is a far-rightist.

The campus group that sponsored Amara’s talk responds:

[T]he burqa ban had widespread political support in France from both the left and right. It is simply incorrect to associate Amara with the French extreme right. A member of the Socialist Party for 23 years, Amara firmly considers herself a “femme de gauche.” A practicing Muslim, born of Algerian immigrant parents in a ghetto outside Clermont-Ferrand, France, Amara falls squarely in the category of those the National Front, the far-right French political party, would love to see deported.