… of János Starker’s cello.

Starker has died, at age 88.

Starker was known for being tough on his students. Former IU basketball coach Bobby Knight, himself known for the demands he placed on his players, asked Starker to come speak to his team.

Afterward one of the players came up to Starker and asked if he could tell Starker a joke.

“Mr Starker there was a car accident and three cellists died and they all tried to get to Heaven,” the student said. He then goes on to explain the joke. St. Peter asks the first two with whom they studied. They answer they studied with Mstislav Rostropovich and Leonard Rosen. St. Peter tells both of them they have to go to Hell.

The third one tells St. Peter he studied with Starker. Then comes the punch line.

“St. Peter says ‘You may come in. You already went through Hell.’”

Tee-hee. Well, state legislators can’t do anything about these two, uh, power centers of the modern American university, so in desperation you sometimes see them – here it’s a guy from Minnesota – issue these sorts of statements. The mental image you should have accompanying Pelowski’s remarks is a frustrated one-year-old kicking his feet against a wall. Except that in this case all-grown-up Gene Pelowski has very accurately and eloquently identified the sources of his frustration.

It’s only frustrating, though, if you think your state university system should be – by some non-athletic standard or other – good.

And why be angry at the idea that spending that money on Tubby is an investment in the future? In the future, the University of Minnesota will be even more strongly – perhaps someday to the point of exclusivity! – associated with basketball.

It is – and always has been – curious to UD, as an observer of universities, that the most violent and mindless game out there totally dominates America’s universities. Universities, where the main thing, you figure, is the mind, get positively orgasmic about, and spend themselves into bankruptcy over, a game which we now know pummels the mind to mush.

Forget the body. Of course we know – quoting John Kass again here –

The game is not just a contact sport — it’s a high-impact collision sport. It is about exploding into your opponent, refusing to break, while breaking others to your will and knocking them senseless.

But Kass also notes that “football scrambles the human brain.” He notes the massive and growing numbers of lawsuits coming from high school, college, and professional teams, as players literally lose their minds. Kass predicts football itself will die in the next few decades.

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UD, however, doubts it. Why? Here’s Kass again:

Make no mistake. I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Universities, at least according to this guy, can’t survive without a foundation of violent tribal ritual:

It is irrational and tribal love. It is intense emotion, not a vague sense of obligation or philanthropy. [Students and alumni] want to beat State.

Read his heavy-breathing about “shirtless boys” and ask yourself whether passions like these can ever be tamed. Whether the American university can survive without them. Already – in coach buyouts alone – university football is destroying the financial foundation of many schools. Those same schools will not hesitate to pay out hundreds of millions more in personal injury claims.

The model here will be big pharma. As a corporate endeavor, pharma cheats and injures, but as long as it can afford to pay out billions every year in legal settlements and still make a big profit, it will continue to do so. Universities will hit up students for higher and higher athletic fees, and students – even more subject to these passions than alumni, it seems – will willingly give.

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UD thanks mwm.

Three students displeased with the University of Ottawa med school decided to sue it. For one hundred and fifty million dollars.

Howsomeever, a Superior Court judge decided that depriving generations of Canadians of medical care by bankrupting a medical school was a tad over the top.

Far as I can tell, two of the three are still enrolled in the school. A bit awkward…

… like the one about Anna Nicole Smith… Musicals full of weird pop culture juxtapositions and unlikely people singing arias… Imagine a once-famous, now-imprisoned, professor of computer engineering. Make him Japanese. Make him married to Rita Coolidge, who will sing of her fidelity to him (“If it takes forever I will wait for you!”). Occasionally Coolidge will enter a reflective mood and sing of her long-ago wacky ‘sixties life with ex-husband Kris Kristofferson (“Your love kept liftin’ me higher!”). The opera will flash back to the professor’s years of thievery at the University of California Irvine, where he double dipped with such intensity that he eventually became the first UC system professor to spend eight years in jail for conflict of interest. The chorus will be composed of frightened graduate students plotting how to report their mentor to the authorities without destroying their own careers…

“If you are making $3 billion a year on Gleevec [a cancer therapy], could you get by with $2 billion?” Dr. [Brian] Druker, who is now director of the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health and Science University, said in an interview.

A group of cancer researchers and physicians calls for reductions in some drug prices.

Here’s another good one:

Dr. John M. Goldman, emeritus professor of hematology at Imperial College in London and a co-author of the commentary, said he knew several researchers who declined to become authors because they feared losing research money from the industry.

Dr. Kantarjian, the lead author, said that was a risk.

“I am sure I am going to be blackballed,” he said. “My research career will be hurt.”

But he said it was time to speak out. “Pharmaceutical companies have lost their moral sense,” he said.

Diederik Stapel just got a long write-up in the New York Times, complete with color photo of the man in jeans plus bummed-I-got-caught look on his face. He’s sorry, he’s mentally ill, he’s written a book. Go to it.

That’s disgusting enough, but the email he sent about it (he doesn’t think he should be fired) is even more disgusting.

Turns out when he rewrote student comments he was “in a very dark and vulnerable place.”

Poor baby.

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Hm. Things have been bumpy in that department for awhile.

Brits are protesting gender segregated events at their universities. In response, universities which have in the past allowed it to happen are beginning to ban the groups that do it.

If efforts to maintain equality at British universities are annoying to you, be aware that Australian universities are much friendlier to the stash-the-girls-in-the-back boys.

At an April 13 lecture on Islamic Jihad in Syria, signs directed “sisters” to the back of the theatre, and “brothers” to the front.

Gender segregation was also encouraged at an information session for prospective Australian Islamic Peace Conference volunteers held by the Islamic Research and Educational Academy at the university’s Public Lecture Theatre on March 10.

The university said the events were held by external organisations and it would not intervene to prevent the practice.

Yes, in Australia, universities don’t stand for anything, so you can bring your organization and do anything you want on that nation’s campuses. As long as you’re “external.”

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Someone managed to dig up some old gender studies professor to squawk about this.

University of Melbourne gender politics professor Sheila Jeffreys said she was shocked to learn that this “form of subordinating women” was taking place on an Australian university campus.

“There needs to be great outrage about this,” Professor Jeffreys said. “It is a Rosa Parks moment . . . Making women sit at the back in lecture theatres is sexual apartheid. This is a new practice in Australia, whereas apartheid against black Americans was an old practice. But it should be challenged strongly so that it goes no further.

“Religious ideas that so blatantly make women into second-class citizens are not worthy of respect. They should not be allowed to undermine people’s justified rejection of discrimination against women.”

Who in the hell allowed that woman to speak?

…non-filthy rich.

George Washington University, “a place known for its beautiful cars,” it says here, has taken a hit: A new BMW M5 parked on campus got hammered by a tree.

Unbelievably, the tragedy was compounded. A man, desperate to reach the car (perhaps he is the owner), crossed a police line around it and got arrested.

My office window is steps from this crash scene. It will be a difficult day for me. I hope they’ve cleaned things up by the time I get to campus.

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The only headline I can think of for this is AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY.

has been named the first recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The new lifetime achievement award, announced Thursday by Librarian of Congress James Billington, will be presented at the 13th annual National Book Festival in September.

Essays about DeLillo by UD can be found here and here.

And here’s a short essay of hers about a story of his – “Midnight in Dostoevsky.”

… did it again. At 9:35, in this speech today, he again cited Keats as the author of the line “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

In this post, UD pointed out that the source of this line, about as unKeatsian a line as I can think of, is John Milton:

318. On His Blindness

WHEN I consider how my light is spent
E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

No one seems to care; there wasn’t any commentary when he did it before; there’s no commentary this time. Two people – UD and a reader – care.

It’s the only card he has left to play. Even then, it’s not a good one, since he’ll have to claim decades of mental illness.

This would be Emory law school professor Michael J. Broyde, object of multiple in-depth accounts – here – of his very odd behavior. Emory is already reviewing him for having made up internet identities whose function appears to be flacking his own work and excoriating that of competitors (à la the so-far more famous Orlando Figes). This is, to be sure, puerile and malicious of Broyde, and it seems to have put an end to his other career as a religious bigwig.

But there’s more, and with it we enter Woody Allen territory.

Apparently Broyde created another online identity, this one with the purpose of providing historical evidence for various of his theological arguments.

The second identity, claiming to be an 80-something Ivy League graduate and Talmud scholar in 2010, alleged he’d had conversations with now long-dead sages in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The alleged conversations were used to produce a manufactured history of statements from long-dead scholars that buttressed an argument that Broyde had made in a highly-touted article published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Broyde, in a later publication, subsequently quoted this second identity’s alleged findings as further proof of his original argument.

To puerile and malicious, add – if true – academic fraud.

This man was reportedly a finalist for grand rabbi of London.

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UD thanks Tzvee.

UD is a major fan of Robert Zaretsky, a history professor at the University of Houston. She found his remarks on Christopher Hitchens, religion, and death to be among the most thoughtful his illness inspired.

Zaretsky’s recent remarks on France’s disgraced chief rabbi are similarly thoughtful; they are the only ones I’ve come across which put this farcically hypocritical man in a larger French perspective.

There’s one paragraph, though, whose prose I’d futz with a bit.

There is no good time to steal other people’s words and thoughts, of course, but now is an especially bad time to do so. The political scene in France has grown toxic, thanks in part to a series of corruption scandals on both the right, involving former president Nicolas Sarkozy and the illicit funding of his party, and the left, with the former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac trapped in a series of lies about Swiss bank accounts. President Francois Hollande’s floundering government, contested in the streets by conservative and reactionary movements, has been unable to reverse either the withering of the economy or the burgeoning of unemployment, much less halt the European Union’s politics of austerity.

On one level, these are great sentences, the kind of packed-with-detail sentences we try to get our students to write. So there’s no Scathing Online Schoolmarm here, none of my complaining about bad writing…

On the other hand, there’s room for improvement, no? I’d first take out some filler, some unnecessary words that weaken the punch of the sentence:

‘There is no good time to steal other people’s words and thoughts, of course, but now is an especially bad time to do so. The political scene in France has grown toxic, thanks in part to a series of corruption scandals on both the right, involving former president Nicolas Sarkozy[‘s] and the illicit funding of his party, and the left, with the former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac trapped in a series of [note redundant use of this word] lies about Swiss bank accounts. President Francois Hollande’s floundering government, contested in the streets by conservative and reactionary movements, has been unable to reverse either the withering of the economy or the burgeoning of unemployment, much less halt the European Union’s politics of austerity.’

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In the second sentence, the problem is excessive and sort of clashing ings: floundering, withering, burgeoning… And I don’t know about you, but often when I see floudering I waste time pondering whether it shouldn’t be foundering … Which isn’t a criticism. Everyone gets to use the English language. And in fact assuming you believe Hollande will be able to keep his government up and running, floudering is right and foundering is wrong…

On withering and burgeoning, I actually think the simple use of fall and rise would be better, even though this seems counter-intuitive, since we’re always supposed to be looking for interesting, dramatic, fresh ways to say things. Yet simplicity in cases like this one is arguably better, since rise and fall keep me focused on the content of the statement, while withering and burgeoning are giving me mixed metaphor palpitations (they’re not really a case of mixed metaphor, but I’m still getting the palpitations).

I suspect the proximity of all these theatrical words (withering floundering burgeoning) is playing into my palpitations…

Nor does it help that after these perhaps too physical words we end with a very abstract phrase: politics of austerity.

So – In no way a bad paragraph, but I guess a bit jumbled between abstract and concrete words.

A rather mushy editorial from the University of Cincinnati AAUP notes the absence of anyone who knows much of anything about education on the university’s board of trustees. Why not take advantage of what the writer delicately calls Stan Chesley’s “legal difficulties,” and replace him with a person who knows more about universities than about making money?

Chesley, you recall, is the disgraced former BOT member whose “astounding greed” has gotten him disbarred in multiple states.

It’s true that once you wipe out all traces of knowledge about universities from your BOT and pack it full of hedgies and Chesleys and bears oh my, you run the risk of serious institutional embarrassment when the SEC or some other agency comes after one of them. UD has followed many stories of BOT members who’ve resigned in disgrace because of shady business dealings.

The editorial writer is certainly correct that viewing your Board of Trustees as an ATM machine is unwise.