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.

You put all the people who come to help you or who just happen upon you at serious risk. The method is appealing because it’s easy to mix the household material, and death comes fast and reliably.

Even if, like a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic this morning, you leave notes in your dorm room warning people off, exposure to others may well happen.

Six people were treated at a hospital; a hazmat unit spent hours cleaning up the building.

It’s like this — Imagine that someone comes along today and accuses Silvio Berlusconi of bribery, fraud, abuse of office, and solicitation of minors for sex. Although he may be totally innocent of these particular charges, Silvio has a decades-long record of allegations, trials, and convictions on just these categories of charges.

Similarly, Auburn University, one of America’s scummiest sports factories, has been in the grade-changing, fake-independent-study, cash-for-athletes game for decades. As the writer for MrSEC.com notes (I quote him in my headline), that school can do all the internal investigations it wants. You and I know that Auburn smells, and always will. So we figure – probably rightly – that it’s guilty of this most recent batch of charges.

… spring.

I post something on this blog every day, most often of course something related to universities. But here I am, 5:50 PM, just starting in on today’s writing, and I’m posting that I’m not posting.

Not posting something about plagiarism, athletics, conflict of interest. Not posting about poetry.

I think, as the song I link to up there goes, that I have spring fever. I mean, spring fever’s part of it, part of the restlessness, the difficulty concentrating, the tendency to wander to the garden and do something – anything – to stay outside on a cool sunny day in the Arboretum And Bird Central Station which is Garrett Park Maryland. The Solomon’s Seal is out, the fallen cherry at the top of the hill puts out white flowers. The white-flowering dogwood that shelters the topiary bulls has been hammered by heavy snow the last few winters, but its lost limbs have allowed it to clarify itself, and it’s more beautiful, more Japanese – in my green and white garden – than ever.

So I wander about, feeling that it would be madness not to be wandering about.

As always, in these supercharged settings, I’m thinking mainly of the dead world-lovers for whom I’m taking up the task of loving the world. Gillian Rose, Tony Judt, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Lasch, and Paul Monette can’t be here – neither, for that matter, can George Orwell and Albert Camus – and I take seriously my role as proxy world-lover for them. Their writing taught me why I should love existence, and now I’m parading my gratitude.

The restlessness is more than that, though. Now that my fear for my sister-in-law is over – she lives in Watertown, and was hunkered down, alone, during the shootouts – I have time to think about what it must have been like for her, and for her neighbors. Relief and sadness come at me at the same time. Also some crazy sort of pity for the depraved little fucker in the boat, bleeding, trembling, trying to do himself in but too weak … Hiding out in the neighbor’s yard like some sick kid’s game…

We sent Joanna an assortment of Beacon Hill chocolates – survivor’s chocolates, we called them in our jokey note… All part of conjuring the event as farce rather than tragedy, and why not.

It’s what the song says. I feel so gay, in a melancholy way.

… in this post. I said that he would crawl into a hole and kill himself.

He apparently did just that. Or he tried to.

Authorities believe Tsarnaev may have tried to shoot himself before he was taken into custody Friday night because of the trajectory and location of the bullet wound in his neck, a source familiar with the investigation said Sunday.

The shot was fired at close range, the source said, suggesting the wound was self-inflicted.

I thought he’d do it because I remembered George Zinkhan, a University of Georgia professor who killed three people (including his wife) and then went missing. He was found in a shallow grave with a bullet he’d put in his head.

Stanley Chesley, big important rich dude in Cincinnati, got his friend the mayor to defend him as “someone who always stands up and fights for the little guy.”

Seeing as Chesley’s multiple recent disbarments have to do with him ripping off the little guy for millions and millions of dollars in profit for himself, the mayor’s defense seems a bit off.

Anyway, it didn’t work. His fellow trustees at the University of Cincinnati “gave Chesley until 5 p.m. on Monday to resign.” Chesley refused, maybe figuring that fantastic defense from the mayor would do the trick.

After a few days, though, Stan figured out the way things were going and resigned. Not only from the university, but from his law practice.

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One of the committees that argued for Chesley’s disbarment referred to his “astounding greed.” If astounding greed barred people from university trusteeships, we’d need to get accustomed to three-person BOTs… You don’t even see Brown University scrutinizing Steven Cohen. On the contrary, they’re defending the guy.

I think Brown’s approach is jail or nothing. If not jail, he can stay.

Once UD gets tired of chronicling the depraved big-time sports programs at the University of Tennessee, she can turn to the UT med school in Memphis.

… notes Huma Yusuf in the New York Times, and indeed this blog has followed with amazement the mandatory gender segregation at a number of university-sponsored events in British universities.

In February, during the annual Pakistan Future Leaders’ Conference at Oxford, which brought together student delegates from more than 40 colleges, a Pakistani friend who is on a fellowship at the university joined a panel discussion on Pakistani politics. During the debate, he was taken aback to hear some participants champion the role of religion in state affairs and call for the revival of an Islamic caliphate. “The only revolution that can work is one brought through Shariah law,” one participant said. Another speaker dismissed the Pakistani Constitution as “human law” that is irrelevant in the face of “divine law.”

It took my friend some time, and several conversations with pro-democracy students who recognized them, to understand that his fellow speakers were [radical Islamic] Hizb-ut-Tahrir activists. “Their interventions were meticulously planned and very disconcerting,” he told me. “It’s clear that they’re very committed to their cause.”

British universities are being remarkably indolent about dealing with the problem. Or maybe they don’t think it’s a problem.

… containing the philosophy of Leopold Bloom as it appears in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce, of which you may have heard.

It’s going to be a handmade book, and… well, watch the film. It tells all.

Now that Joyce’s work has been liberated from the grasp of his grandson, projects like this one are flourishing. UD is excited, and has just done her bit – by way of a financial contribution – to The Works of Master Poldy. She can’t wait to see it.

… the second bomber, UD‘s sister-in-law watches the news and stays inside.

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A WBUR interview with Joanna last year, about a show she curated at the Museum of Fine Arts school.

… who lives right in the midst of it in Watertown.

While Mr UD was talking to her ten minutes ago, she noted a swat team entering a house just across the street from hers.

She says she is basically watching television and talking to the people who are calling her.

She has “enough rice and sugar for about a month. Dinner and dessert!”

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She just called again. Swat team in her backyard. She heard someone say Hands up.

I’m not making this up.

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Another call. All clear.

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But she is definitely very rattled.

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UD will venture a prediction: If this person has any shred of a rational mind left, he has crawled into a hole somewhere and killed himself. Police will find a body.

… eloquence, from UD‘s Montgomery County neighbor.

… the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The university has closed down and asked students and anyone else on campus to shelter in place.

A campus policeman responding to a disturbance call at MIT has been shot and killed outside one of its buildings.

People are being advised to stay indoors; the shooter is at large.

It’s unlikely to be connected to the marathon bombings, but it’s not impossible.

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Situation escalating, with what appears to be a police chase, many gunshots, and even explosions reported, in Watertown, where UD‘s sister-in-law lives.

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AP reports “an arrest is imminent” in the marathon bombings.

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Mr UD just spoke to his sister, who lives in the center of the activity. She had not long ago been awakened by a phone call from the police – they told her to stay inside. Just after that, she heard two explosions.

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Confirmed: The Watertown suspects are the marathon bombers. One of the bombers has been killed. The other remains at large.

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Police are now going door to door in Watertown.

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Events as of 8:00 AM Friday:

[T]he suspects [Chechen brothers with military experience, both of whom had been in the States for about a year] approached a police officer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and shot him in the head.

The two then stole the officer’s cruiser, robbed a nearby 7-Eleven, carjacked a Mercedes SUV and briefly kidnapped the driver, the sources said. The suspects threw explosives out the window during the chase that followed, they said. A Boston transit police officer was shot and wounded, authorities said.

The dead suspect — the man in the black hat from the FBI photos — had an improvised explosive device strapped to his chest, law enforcement officials said.

Kitzenberg said that the firefight ended when one of the shooters ran toward the Watertown officers and ultimately fell to the ground. Kitzenberg said he could not tell whether the man was tackled or had been shot.

The other drove the SUV through a line of police offcers at the end of the street, he said. A bullet from the gunbattle lodged in the wall of Kitzenberg’s apartment, he said.

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Remaining suspect just graduated from Rindge and Latin School, steps from our Cambridge house.

News flash from this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina.

Who knew?