UD‘s pretty sure she’s on the side of Green Mountain College in this dispute about whether to slaughter and then sustainably eat two oxen who’ve had to be retired from the fields.

But she knows she’s enjoying some of the things people on and off campus are saying.

Off-campus enemies of the slaughter and eat approach are, say the provost, “at war, and they don’t take prisoners.”

A student notes: “It’s funny that it’s blown up in such a way, because on any other farm anywhere, this isn’t even a conversation that you would begin to have. It’s something that animals get to a certain point in their lives and they become food. And that’s just how it’s been for years, you know, decades.” Millennia, actually.

… with this rather baffling story about a high-ranking athletics adviser kept on staff for years and years although plenty of evidence of his sexual misconduct was apparently out there. Lots of news outlets are picking up the story as we speak, even though so far Paul Gray’s misbehavior doesn’t approach Jerry Sandusky’s. Among other things, “an unnamed UI student told investigators that Gray had exchanged money and football tickets in return for sexual favors from another person who was not affiliated with the university.” He made inappropriate sexual comments pretty routinely; he reportedly on occasion offered to perform oral sex on students.

All bad stuff; but without Penn State in the background, it wouldn’t get as much attention as it’s now getting.

Other writers have more depth, greater verbal gifts, but few are as wickedly funny as Philip Roth, who recently announced his retirement from writing (and it sounds as though he means it).

In one of those lost chord moments, I recall sitting in my boyfriend’s car outside Chicago’s Newbery Library one cold afternoon, waiting for him to pick something up there. I was listening to a tape he had of Philip Roth reading from one of his stories, and I was rolling with laughter. I can’t find it now – probably wouldn’t recognize it if I did hear it.

I remember, too, my parents howling over Portnoy’s Complaint, reading aloud to one another the scene where his mother describes one of his classmates who’s made it big:

Pianist! Oh, that’s one of the words they just love, almost as much as doctor, Doctor. And residency. And best of all, his own office. He opened his own office in Livingston. “Do you remember Seymour Schmuck, Alex?” she asks me, or Aaron Putz or Howard Shlong, or some yo-yo I am supposed to have known in grade school twenty-five years ago, and of whom I have no recollection whatsoever. “Well, I met his mother on the street today, and she told me that Seymour is now the biggest brain surgeon in the entire Western Hemisphere. He owns six different split-level ranch-type houses made all of fieldstone in Livingston, and belongs to the boards of eleven synagogues, all brand-new and designed by Marc Kugel, and last year with his wife and his two little daughters, who are so beautiful that they are already under contract to Metro, and so brilliant that they should be in college – he took them all to Europe for an eighty-million-dollar tour of seven thousand countries, some of them you never even heard of, that they made them just to honor Seymour, and on top of that, he’s so important, Seymour, that in every single city in Europe that they visited he was asked by the mayor himself to stop and do an impossible operation on a brain in hospitals that they also built for him right on the spot, and – listen to this – where they pumped into the operating room during the operation the theme song from Exodus so everybody should know what religion he is – and that’s how big your friend Seymour is today! And how happy he makes his parents!” And you, the implication is, when are you going to get married already. In Newark and the surrounding suburbs this is apparently the question on everybody’s lips: WHEN IS ALEXANDER PORTNOY GOING TO STOP BEING SELFISH AND GIVE HIS PARENTS, WHO ARE SUCH WONDERFUL PEOPLE, GRANDCHILDREN?

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

I like the way Roth recently responded to an interviewer who asked him if he’s afraid of death.

“Yes, I’m afraid. It’s horrible… What else could I say? It’s heartbreaking. It’s unthinkable. It’s incredible. Impossible.”

And from the same 2005 interview, some insight on why he has stopped writing:

“When I write, I’m alone. It’s filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety – and I never needed religion to save me.”

I ask him why he keeps writing then, if it’s so lonely and full of anxiety? He sighs – loudly.

“There are some days that compensate completely,” he says. “In my life I have had, in total, a couple of months of these completely wonderful days as a writer, and that is enough … It’s actually a good question… You know, it’s a choice to be occupied with literature, like everything else is a choice. But you quickly identify with the profession. And that’s the first nail in the coffin. Then you struggle across the decades to make your work better, to make it a bit different, to do it again and to prove to yourself that you can do it.”

“But you know that you can do it now, right?”

“I have no idea that I can do it again. How can I know? How do I know that I won’t run out of ideas tomorrow? It’s a horrible existence being a writer[,] filled with deprivation. I don’t miss specific people, but I miss life. I didn’t discover that during the first 20 years, because I was fighting – in the ring with the literature. That fight was life, but then I discovered that I was in the ring all by myself.”

He gets up. “It was the interests in life and the attempt to get life down on the pages which made me a writer – and then I discovered that, in many ways, I am standing on the outside of life”.

It’s the theme played out in Thomas Mann’s story, Tonio Kröger.

This sounds hilarious.

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

Okay. You can watch it on this site. It’s amazingly good.

Now it’s Carnegie Mellon’s turn to do what UD calls TRUSTEE-DELETE.

Yeshiva University is the undisputed T-D standard, having – during the wee hours after two of their trustees, Bernie Madoff and Ezra Merkin, started attracting global attention – simply gone in and without any public comment deleted from Yeshiva’s website all mentions of their names.

Faced with a narco-dollar trafficker on their BOT, Carnegie-Mellon has behaved better than panicky, secretive YU.

Ken Walters, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh university, confirmed that [Marco Antonio] Delgado was a trustee from 2006 through mid-2012.

‘I wish it was someone else,’ he said.

They’ve trustee-deleted, but they’ve also made themselves available for public statements of regret.

Delgado “gave the school $250,000 to establish the Marco Delgado Fellowship for the Advancement of Hispanics in Public Policy and Management.” They’re going to have to decide what to do about that.

Universities, UD has noted on this blog, are reputation-launderers. It’s not surprising that a money-launderer would be attracted to them.

The drunks at H-S and Ole Miss
Went out late to take a group piss.
“The libs and the fairies
Have all gone for Barry.
What the hell kind of country is this?”

… around.

… is in some sort of trouble for some sort of inappropriate something.

Rather, I ask you to notice what one of his students says about his class, a psych course at Northeastern University:

“Sometimes during class, his wife will call and he’ll talk to her.”

The student also admits he’s been known to make “racially inappropriate” comments, and told students on their first day to not even bother buying the textbook listed on the class syllabus.

“We haven’t learned anything,” she says, claiming she has yet to receive a grade. Because she has no grades to her name, however, she’s nervous she won’t be granted credit for the class — a class she’s already paid for.

This is only one student; but these are observations reasonably easy to confirm or deny by talking to other students.

Let’s say she’s describing things correctly. Put aside the claim about racial insensitivity, which presumably is related to the trouble he’s now in. (He’s been removed from the class, but Northeastern is refusing to say why.) This is a professor who talks on his cell phone during class. He assigns a textbook and then tells students not to buy it. He hasn’t given out a grade yet, and they’re probably past the midway point of their semester. “We haven’t learned anything.”

Why do students put up with it? Over the course of writing this blog, UD has encountered other stories like this — classes where a scandalous lack of anything is going on, about which not one student seems to complain.

… a scummy industry to have Obama in the White House again.

… loser.

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

Swift and excellent statement from the chancellor:

“… [T]he reports of uncivil language and shouted racial epithets appear to be accurate and are universally condemned by the university, student leaders and the vast majority of students who are more representative of our university creed.”

[Dan] Jones said parents are being notified that “one of America’s safest campuses is safe again this morning, though all of us are ashamed of the few students who have negatively affected the reputations of each of us and of our university.”

SOS would only tweak this in the following way: Instead of negatively affected, just say hurt, or harmed, or damaged. Remember Thomas Jefferson:

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

George Washington University students celebrating in front of the White House late last night.

More pictures.

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

LOL.

Heard loud and clear over chants of “U.S.A.” and “Obama” was an unnamed George Washington University undergraduate screaming to her friends: “I legitimately have a paper due tomorrow!”

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

Last night was a nail-biter.

Yeah, we’ve got that.

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

A Win for Professors.

If you can understand the Five Stages of Grief, thank a professor.

And a professor shall lead them.

Professor Bashing as Clever Strategy on the Eve of a National Election.

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

The Three Horsemen of the Republican Apocalypse:

Empiricism

Humaneness

Proper Speech

An ABC news pundit just summed up the problem that’s kept the Republicans down in this election. And we can quote it here at University Diaries because it’s a university reference.

UD will cop to being extremely excited to hear, just now, that Elizabeth Warren won in Massachusetts. UD has been a big supporter of Warren from the start, and it’s been a close race throughout. Big sigh.

… Cecilia Chang, the former dean at St. John’s University who has been on trial in New York (background here), has hanged herself.

The judge who questioned her yesterday calls her death “a Shakespearean tragedy.”

For UD, who thinks here of the very similar suicide of Karen Pletz, Shakespearean is not quite right. These two suicides are the type UD calls boxed-in. People have gotten themselves into a tighter and tighter place, and it now looks very clear indeed that they’re not going to get out. That they’re headed for just two boxes – a cell and a coffin – and that’s the end of the story. To decide to check out at this point seems not surprising.

Bernie Madoff and his wife reportedly tried to kill themselves before he went to prison.

These would be Shakespearean tragedies if these people had tried to lead good lives and been undone by unbidden catastrophe. If, tormented by those catastrophes, they had, to the last, struggled to go on leading valuable lives.

It is sad, but not tragic, when a criminal, outwitted, must reckon with terrible humiliation and punishment. You could say, in the case of Chang, that someone should have noticed that she was out of control (UD called her out of control in the last post she wrote about her) and put her on suicide watch. But you cannot, I think, say that her death was tragic.

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

You should really always try to speak directly. Especially in cases like this one.

“Mrs. Chang is no longer with us,” [the trial judge] announced to jurors, according to panelists.

For several seconds, jurors said they had no idea what Johnson was trying to tell them, before he went into the grim details.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm suggests doing it this way in order not to look ridiculous, and not to confuse people:

Jurors, I’m deeply sorry to announce that this morning police found Cecilia Chang dead by her own hand.

It’s Haleem Jubilee College! The place to be if you’re a girl who wants to be protected from molestation and from the “evil things” that phones make happen.

An audit of South Carolina State University, labeled incomplete by its auditor, was approved Monday afternoon by the board of trustees’ executive committee.

The vote on the audit came almost a month after it was due in the S.C. Comptroller General’s office.

Only three of the five committee members participated in Monday’s teleconference about the audit.

Dr. Walt L. Tobin, one of two people calling themselves chair of the board…

Eh. Forget it.