The Bobby Knight of the University of Utah – a swimming coach with anger issues – reportedly got away with abusing his swimmers for years. It wasn’t until recent allegations of his having sexually abused a fifteen-year-old girl that Utah finally suspended him.
Suspension. I guess the swimmers – and their families – who’ve been filing complaints about his sadistic behavior (outlined here) will just have to sit back and watch him be reinstated once his legal problems are over.
Or not. Another scenario would involve UU facing negligence lawsuits from many people, given the damages the coach was able to continue to inflict on student swimmers over years, despite incessant formal protest.
… band.
[Professor] Frampton sees academia’s denizens as creative misfits who deserve special protection. “People who are socially inept can nevertheless be the most creative people,” he told me one afternoon on the telephone. “It’s very important that they can’t be fired. This is the genius of tenure.”
Turns out the Argentine legal system doesn’t extend special protection to tenured professors. He’ll be in jail for awhile.
The New York Times article about a man this blog has followed closely for the duration of his martyrdom (type FRAMPTON in my search engine) strikes the right tone — that of telling an extended joke.
… Yeshiva University, an institution whose misdeeds – financial, moral, sexual – do much to keep blogs like this one in business.
UD well remembers her early aesthetic encounters with the vagina. There was, naturellement, Courbet’s L’Origine du monde; there was Humbert Humbert’s description of the heavy lifting involved in doing Charlotte (“I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.”); there was Henry Miller’s hymn to a whore (“All the men she’s been with, and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you…”)…
The language of the University of Cincinnati student group currently displaying vagina photographs on campus (students modeled for them) is much less pretty (“Our demonstration serves to call attention to the vagina as a site of conflict in medical, legislative, domestic, and representational arenas.”), but then this is about politics, not art. In response to an anti-abortion group that’s been on campus displaying lurid photos of fetuses, this group intends to reclaim some symbolic territory from them.
Yes, things are muddled here – vagina, womb, fetus – but I think that’s okay. If you’re going to go there (see Governor Vaginal Probe) others will too.
… Weimann also paradoxically hangs on for dear life to the immutability and virginal inviolability of literary genres. Everything else in human life is supposed to be transformed in the name of human ‘progress,’ and humankind is invited (ordered?) to participate in the mutation with whoops of joy, but hands off the sacrosanct rules of narrative art! ‘The loss of the temporal dimension,’ he writes warningly, ‘means the destruction of the specific narrative effect, namely the representation of temporal processes, development, mutation, changes, etc.’ And this is reprehensible because, ‘in back of the aesthetic negation of narrative stands the ideological negation of self-transforming reality, the negation of the historicity of our world.’ … Weimann thinks it is morally inadmissable for mankind, even if it prefers to do so, to take refuge in art from ‘historicity’…
…The Russians… [have] brought out bulldozers… to break up outdoor exhibitions of abstract art by their younger painters, who were curiously indifferent to the glories and achievements of the historical process.”
Joseph Frank, who here takes down a stodgy Marxist critic of literary modernism, has died, age 94.
While there, she visited a capybara.
Universities are open environments; anyone can wander around in lobbies and classrooms and labs. It might be harder to get into the library, but even there access isn’t all that difficult; and thieves can sweep along behind students as they enter their locked dormitories.
Similarly, if someone wants to take a class of mine — I mean, just shows up, takes a seat, isn’t registered … I’m unlikely to make a fuss. I don’t think it’s ever happened, but if it did, I probably wouldn’t do much about it. Maybe mention it to the department office manager…
Maybe I think about this question of vulnerability more than other people because I teach in classrooms directly across from the State Department, a quick trip from the Pentagon, four blocks from the White House.
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Yesterday, a law school class at Seattle University was interrupted by a man in a trench coat who
walked into the class eating an ice-cream cone and sat on a table near the podium at the front of the room, said a student who asked not to be identified.
The professor asked the man to leave; when he refused, she called campus security.
The man’s actions became increasingly erratic and threatening, and with no sign of campus officers, the professor dismissed the class, according to the student.
Seattle police said the man was talking incoherently and turned over tables and other classroom furniture.
… “It was horrifying,” said another student who asked not to be named. “I thought we were going to be that next school in the news about school shootings.”
Her New York Times obituary quotes from one of her stories.
“I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
“Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
“He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
“I said, O.K. I don’t argue when there’s real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
“The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
“My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.
“That’s possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began.”
… there are quite a few Wee Ones.
Wee Ones are teeny weeny provincial pinpricks on the national collegiate map, places run by teeny weeny provincial people all of whom have pretty much exactly the same religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds.
You do not have to be in the literal provinces to be a Wee One; indeed, the biggest Wee One in America (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) is Yeshiva University, located in the dynamic midst of our most dynamic metropolis. Forcing ground of Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, Yeshiva has attained its signature WO mix of academic go-nowhere-ism, financial corruption, and (the true distinguishing mark of the fully-evolved WO) religious self-righteousness, because its all-male, all-buddy board of trustees has difficulty grasping the meaning of the term conflict of interest.
To be sure, some Wee Ones, like President-for-Life Glenn Poshard’s Southern Illinois University, are located (right, check the name) in the provinces. Some WOs lack the moral superiority religious institutions bring to their misdeeds. But all Wee Ones share – now or in the recent past – conflicted boards of trustees; and many, of course, add to this mix a willingly conflicted university president.
If you review this blog’s Conflict of Interest category for the Wee Ones hit parade, you’ll find New York’s St John’s University right at the front of the fun.
Now, provincial typically means convoluted, so you’re going to have to put on your thinking cap to follow all of the insider connections in the latest St John’s (a Catholic school whose president is a priest) scandal. For instance, a certain Wile, chief of staff to President Father Donald Harrington, got a loan from the Chair of the BOT…
Wile used the loan from the former Chair [of the BOT] to help fund a real-estate venture with university president Father Donald Harrington, his boss. Neither loan was disclosed to the board of trustees at the time they were made.
Oh, with Father Harrington! Okay, and you and Harrington and I guess the former Chair decided not to tell the rest of the guys on the board about it. Okay.
Wile went on to be not only Harrington’s chief of staff, but vice-president for institutional development (given his remarkable money smarts, which landed him in a position where he needed massive loans and got them unethically). And… I dunno.. there’s more… but ol’ UD is running out of steam on this one…
Go where the need is greatest, they say, and wealthy businessman Scott Ginsburg became convinced that yet another fitness center on Georgetown University’s campus – this one exclusively for the use of law students – would best serve humanity.
He gave millions of dollars toward its construction, and the whole deal was basically one of those love-fests – Georgetown was gonna plaster his picture on all the medicine balls or whatever; the school invited him to be on the Board of Visitors …
Sure, the university was aware that the SEC was somewhat, er, exercised about Ginsburg’s insider trading; but what would universities, from Brown to the University of Michigan, do without insider traders on the faculty and the board of trustees? All that money has to come from somewhere…
So, I mean, they took the money and they built the dealie, but when Ginsburg actually got hammered by the SEC, Georgetown decided, on reflection, that it would rather the face of an insider trader not be hung, like one more religious icon, from the Jesuit school’s walls.
This behavior shattered Ginsburg’s innocence. In his lawsuit, he writes:
“Ginsburg was invited to join the Georgetown Board of Visitors, welcomed to university functions, invited on university trips and generally embraced by the university, all with the goal of extracting ever more money from him.”
So! It had all been a nefarious tit for tat!
Now that the scales have fallen from Ginsburg’s eyes, he has sued, not only to get his money back, but for the repair of his idealism.
… then you’re just not my type.
Penn State. If there are other students there like Mary Krupa, there’s hope for the place.
Pretty big snowstorm predicted for tomorrow – and here I thought, early-March, that we’d dodged all that.
Worst on Wednesday, and I don’t have to be on campus, so I can enjoy the views from my living room in Garrett Park.
Have been making many fires, enjoying hearth and home. Herds of young deer race about at the top of our hill. I watch them while the fire crackles. Aroma of sweet smoke. Silence all around.
Or the sound of many birds – some cardinals have built a nest in the house gutters, and the babies pip when the food comes in. There are hawks, high up, and, at night, owls. These also are things to see and hear.
John, next door neighbor, waylays me as I gather wood – wants to talk about the nature park we share. His big camera is around his neck; his big cat is tied up a few feet away. John misses his mother, who died two months ago. This what he does instead of visiting her.
He tells me everything he’s seen – a large fox, two hawks…
It’s true that you can become engrossed in the wildlife. The carnage alone – rabbit skulls, fallen cooper’s hawks – is fascinating. I’ve found antlers, of course; and bright feathers.
With the large herd of deer there’s deershit along all the paths I’ve created. They turn out to be deer paths. Doing all I can to make their lives more pleasant. If I leave a molecule of taste on a discarded plastic container, racoons take it out of the recycling and then drop it deep in the forest. I go through, every couple of weeks, cleaning out their trash.
I’m right now sitting surrounded by my students at a very sunny seminar table – windows the length of the walls on two sides. They are taking their midterm. Crayola blue sky, not a cloud. Sharp edges of colorless federal buildings against the blue.
The city is quiet. Faint engine sounds and nothing else. It’s only 9:30. Rush hour has quieted down, and people are settling into their offices. Far-off contrails up there. But really, little to see.
Only the beautiful faces of my students. They are hunching, writing. They are sniffing, coughing, blowing their noses. Yes, to me, as they scratch their ways across blue books, they are very beautiful.
Single-space, double-space, use both sides of the page? They have asked me these questions, and I have answered them.
There’s a monastic stillness even here, a twenty-first century urban university. A quiet blue sky and only the white noise of heat and lighting. I’ve left the door to the room open because it’s quiet in the hallway too. An occasional chat among adjuncts in a nearby office is all.
I keep the time on the blackboard. 10:04, I write.
Normalcy is the great thing. John Wilpers’ New York Times obit ends by quoting him:
“All of this was very sad,” he said of the war. “I didn’t want to do anything to describe it as wonderful. What happened happened. Like any war, it should be regretted.”
Absence of war. Absence of conflict. Now the Presidential helicopter flies by the seminar room (even the helicopter is quiet). Twelve years ago Connie, the English department office manager, watched from her office as the Pentagon burned. I never forget where I am, what my city is. Its bland buildings and bright sky never fool me.
Still, it’s not Karachi. Metro authorities instruct us in the dimensions of dangerous packages, but we’re not really looking. We’re trusting the normalcy of the setting, our lucky country, our city the heart of our lucky country.
In 2000, Garrett Park’s median family income was $126,662. Widowers like John Wilpers, father of my oldest friend, live well, in houses whose value has quintupled since they bought them.
In my house, Munro Leaf – author of Ferdinand, a peaceful book, lived and died.
… with a three-year, half a million dollar salary, contract extension.
Not that they’re going to tell you that.
In the first image accompanying this BBC obituary for John Wilpers, his daughter, UD‘s oldest friend, holds a photograph of her father having captured and kept from suicide Tojo.
The article says Wilpers died in a Garrett Park nursing home, but there are no nursing homes here. He died, I assume, in the Garrett Park house he’d lived in for… what? Sixty years, I guess. When UD’s family came back from England (a year-long immunology fellowship for UD‘s father), they moved across the street from the Wilpers family, and UD and Terry became close friends.
UD regarded Terry’s father as a bland well-meaning parental thing – hardly the sort to hold a gun to Tojo and to his doctor, and order the doctor to fix Tojo’s attempted-suicide wound.
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The New York Times obituary.
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UD thanks Jon.
