A newspaper reader describes the leadership of the University of Alabama:

For the person that called about Jim Tressel running Ohio State: Who do you think runs the University of Alabama? It’s definitely not any of the presidents or trustees or board members or anyone else like that. His name is Nick Saban. He runs everything at the University of Alabama.

William Bowen, former president of Princeton, in an interview:

I’m not a fan of huge salaries for presidents of academic institutions. These are hard jobs. But people don’t really do them for the money. What kind of message do you really want to convey concerning the nature of the institution and its leadership? I always thought that it was important to convey a message of we’re all in this together. If you as president earn so much more than everyone else, it’s hard to argue that we’re all in this together.

It’s an old-fashioned answer, and one that doesn’t really take into account profound changes in the American university. Under “huge salaries,” he has in mind presidents who earn more than one million dollars a year. One of Bowen’s successors at Princeton now works for for-profit DeVry, whose chief executives typically earn between twenty and one hundred million dollars a year, as do the leaders of most other for-profit universities. That’s the wave of the higher ed future, not a bunch of paupers pulling down $800,000 year and throwing money away on student scholarships and shit.

… UD‘s now in Dublin. The city is currently sporting classic Irish weather: exuberantly sunny one moment – opening up amazing, long O’Connell Street vistas – and then wham. A wet black blanket of cloud.

Somewhere in Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, he quotes from his lover’s Paris notebooks. Back in Paris after years away, the lover describes feeling the drag of nostalgia.

It’s a little like that for me, being in Dublin after having spent a lot of time here when I was much younger.

I’m glad to see O’Connell isn’t gussied up the way I worried it might be. This is still an old and somewhat thready city – the Dublin I recall.

I see the Liffey River and O’Connell Street in two ways, really: With my own particular nostalgias, and with the more objective eyes of someone who reads and re-reads Joyce’s Ulysses. I see not merely scenes from that novel, but scenes from Joyce’s life along the river and street, as I (my feet aching from the long airport corridors) walk and walk, taking it in.

So true. And so seldom said. We’re supposed to weep for coaches who recruit upstanding young scholar athletes who turn out to be criminals. How could the coaches have known?

Their rap sheets?

“You can’t win big in college sports unless you’re corrupt and lawless,” Steve Rosenbloom goes on to explain.

… And now it’s getting sunny and warm. The weather has been strange.”

La Kid, in a Skype chat today, described the weird world UD‘s about to enter as she flies to Ireland. She’ll be in Bono’s Clarence House for a few days, and then here, in Galway.

While she’s in Ireland, she’d like to revisit a few places: Newport House, with its salmon river; Newgrange; Inishbofin. All of these are locations that have lodged in UD‘s mind for many years. She’d like to see them again.

UD will blog of her adventures.

Four out of five Tamarac [Florida] commissioners from the class of 2006 have been arrested. I haven’t seen an arrest rate that high since the University of Miami football team was winning national championships.

Michael Mayo, Sun Sentinel

Auburn University: The scummiest sports factory in the nation.

And that is saying one hell of a lot.

Most have involved medical faculty. This one’s about a nurse.

UD continues to follow the growing university-as-pill-mill story closely.

… has an eighty percent drop-out rate earn twenty million dollars a year?

In the for-profit sector, of course.

Astoundingly trashy.

… and I’ll have a chance to blog a bit later this evening, I think, after I rest up.

… Dublin, Ireland on Saturday. UD, who likes her quiet life, now launches a noisy spring break. She will of course blog throughout her travels. Ne quittez pas.

Wow. Sounds bad. And when you realize they’re incredibly highly paid and highly touted University of Minnesota professors, it sounds even worse. For Minnesota. The story’s been kicking around for years. UM’s been keeping them close anyway. The school seems to have separation issues.

He specializes in risk and uncertainty; she’s into the “cognitive processes underlying the interaction of people with complex systems.” So you put that together (Sainfort and Jacko are married) and you get two high-rollers who maybe figure they’ll give double dipping in the complex system that is a university a whirl …

Georgia Tech, where they used to teach, is going after them through the courts for the two full-time salaries they got even though they’d already taken jobs at Minnesota (where they also pulled down salaries). Plus it’s after them for fraudulent billing, theft of funds… pretty much everything determined faculty thieves can do.

Hold them close, Minnesota! Keep that half million dollar joint salary aloft! No doubt they are innocent, and will go on to great things.

… for the first time, at Dundee University, on March 19.

Audience members will be asked to recite the final lines of what many consider the world’s worst poem, William Topaz McGonagall’s Tay Bridge Disaster.

Sing it with me:

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

While teaching a course at NYU law school on corruption, New York’s Waterfront Commissioner, Ronald Goldstock, parked his car illegally.

An enterprising reporter waited by the car – it was there for six hours – until Goldstock returned to it, and asked him why he had done this.

It’s not illegal, he said, pointing to the THIS VEHICLE ON OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS placard he’d placed in his car’s front window.

UD likes the sound of this. She likes the idea of designating her teaching hours Official Police Business.

From The McGill Daily:

[W]hy are we so keen on defining grief as a disorder?

… The inclusion of pathological grief as a clinical diagnosis would serve to reinforce the perception of grief as a problematic, rather than a natural human reaction to loss and bereavement.

[Leeat] Granek’s concerns over the inclusion of grief in the DSM stretch beyond the realm of negative societal perceptions and attitudes. Grieving has traditionally been done in tight-knit communities made up of family, friends, and close community-members. In recent years, these support networks have shrunk or largely disappeared, which has changed the way individuals are able to grieve. Granek explains what is happening is a “diagnostic creep” which has meant that more and more people are being screened for grief “disorder.” Indeed, as Granek pointed out, anyone who has ever experienced a loss or grief falls into that purview, and can face diagnosis. As grief becomes an increasingly common diagnosis of disorder, human experiences are relegated to the institutionalized sphere: the offices of therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. “…

See also Edward Shorter’s recent essay.