… – like an American university’s partnership with a beer company – there’s often a … call it an initial unhappy hour, during which problems in the partnership get smoothed out. Only once they’re smoothed out can the 24/7 happy hour truly flow.

America’s number two party school, the University of Iowa, is as we speak in that awkward between-time with Anheuser-Busch, which is giving the school kegfuls of cash in exchange for the school letting them use Iowa’s logo on their ads.

Apparently already, just days after the deal was signed, banners are being pulled down from local bars.

Downtown Iowa City is lined with alcohol ads in bar windows that include footballs, helmets, the word “Iowa” and generic images of a hawk.

It’s upsetting to think that the beautiful image the local reporter conjures here is in danger of being marred by a misunderstanding. But that’s just part one.

The university committee formed to review all alcohol decisions is upset because, well…

The Presidential Committee on Athletics, created to weigh in on athletics issues, will receive an update Thursday on the sponsorship deal from athletic director Gary Barta.

Some committee members have angrily questioned the purpose of the advisory group because the athletics department signed the deal without informing them. University of Iowa President Sally Mason will address the committee about the its role at Thursday’s meeting, said Bill Hines, committee chairman and a law professor at the university.

See my thing would be Presidential and all it sounds very fancy and I’m thrilled to be on it yeah sign me up!! … Presidential… But they didn’t even tell, let alone consult my committee, about the fucking deal. So Barta will “update” us, eh? Mason will condescend to “inform” us, eh? There’s a personal dignity issue here, as well as the question of how cynical I want to be made to feel about life! How much of a dupe I want to feel I am!

See your role is to provide what we call cover. Your role is to be serious people who sit in rooms looking serious while we ink the deal. Get it? Shut up.

This isn’t exactly the kind of juxtaposition you want if you are a university about to hire for a year a man so drunk at the wheel he kept driving even after hitting a truck and spinning out. DUI plus hit and run aren’t chopped liver; he could go to jail for a year on either charge.

So, okay, the juxtaposition. It’s embarrassing. The elegant encomium from Kissinger immediately followed by the inelegant particular of the court date. September 12 – the very beginning of the semester. Who will cover Crocker’s class while he’s off who knows how long to Spokane? And he’s pleading not guilty, which is a bad sign since he does seem guilty, with witnesses and probably a film of the arrest, etc. Does Crocker think he wasn’t drunk? If so, maybe he’s in denial about a dangerous problem. Soon he’ll be driving around New Haven.

Details.

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

Good timing. Let someone else handle the mess.

A Newcastle University professor, in a somewhat obscure though highly literate act of protest, has – it is alleged – taken a screwdriver and etched onto 24 fancy cars in his affluent neighborhood words like arbitrary and really wrong.

Stephen Graham (this is where you could have found him before Newcastle unpersoned him) definitely has a strong anti-capitalist orientation (he’s interviewed a few minutes into this YouTube), but dressing all in black and crouching down and scratching his rage into BMWs seems a bit much. A neighbor caught him doing it. He’s been arrested.

First day back at George Washington University after a long hot summer was strange; but then GW, fashionably set in Foggy Bottom, is an unusual school. To get Washingtonians accustomed to its new visual identity, the university has plastered the Foggy Bottom metro station with logos and slogans and postmodern images of the first president. UD exited the station mentally draped in her place of business.

But now the business of getting coffee and a scone at the Starbucks in GW Hospital ensued; and as she stood in line singing along to Ella Fitzgerald singing Lullaby of Birdland, GW’s new banners began to fade. Miserable interns brooded at tables; the woman at the counter asked UD her name and UD eyed the cup to see how she’d misspell it; outside the cafe’s big windows, some sort of street work or street cleaning was making a lot of noise. This was the city, and UD’d been in the suburbs for months, a quiet setting.

Instantly, on leaving the hospital, UD was greeted by students and colleagues here and there and over there, which made the loud streets feel less like a city than a village. UD felt both happy and threatened at the thought of how long she’d stomped these grounds.

Approaching her office in Academic Center, she worried: Would she remember, after all this time, her latest password?

In fact she had forgotten it. Panicked scrabbling about revealed a scrap of paper on which she’d written it.

She prepared her courses – The Short Story in the morning and Modernism in the afternoon – and she was happy because UD loves these subjects and because both class lists included several repeat customers. How lurid could UD be if multiple people went out of their way to endure her not once but twice?

Sometimes UD‘s classes are right in Academic Center, steps from her office; sometimes getting to them means a stroll among endless, almost identical, groundscrapers. This semester it’s a stroll, and UD made all the absent-minded professor mistakes available to her here. After glancing at the addresses, she convinced herself the buildings meant were ones in which she’d already taught. How many basements of how many corporate towers does GW rent after all? Can’t be many. So in hellish heat she set out, noting that, on every single block, road or building work was underway, making her zigzaggedly cross to avoid one closed sidewalk after another. Sirens – construction, security – blasted madly. Flag-ridden limousines drove through stop signs.

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

Ah shit. Recognizing her mistake in the middle of F Street, UD suddenly turns around and there’s her friend Michael, a dean. “Getting run over, Mawgaret?” he asks in his lovely British accent. “Trying to,” says UD.

Finding the first classroom, once UD rights herself, is a cinch – it’s in the supercool Elliott School building, across from the State Department. Her second classroom is the one in the basement of a rather distant corporate tower, and here, even when she finds the building, she and everyone else run around confused. When UD finally finds her class, a woman looking for an Arabic course follows her into the room. “It says 103 right here,” she tells UD. UD tells her that Arabic is not one of her strengths.

As we get in the fall arrest swing, a local columnist writes an update.

A University of Florida student takes the Football Shouldn’t Control the University side in the debate.

Today In University Life begins with the theft of “tens of thousands of dollars worth of bronze” from the base of a statue of James Joyce at a Jesuit university in Denver.

The sculpture was a tribute to ‘Ulysses.’ In the book there are 18 chapters and at the bottom of the sculpture there used to be 18 bronze plates.

“There was a quote from each of those chapters on each of the plates,” said Regis administrator Dr. Tom Reynolds.

UD thinks it sporting of the Jesuits to honor Joyce, who didn’t exactly praise them to the skies in his writing, and she thinks it’s a pity that they’ve lost part of what looks like a beautiful statue.

The news story about the theft includes the sort of spelling error Joyce would have put in Finnegans Wake (maybe he did): “It’s not just a chunk of inconsiquential detail.”

It’s the nation’s number two ranked party school, and the “contract between Anheuser-Busch and Learfield Communications Inc. — the sports-marketing company representing the (Iowa) Hawkeye Athletics Department — allows Anheuser-Busch to use the Tigerhawk logo in advertising.” But Iowa’s president sees the bright side.

“It’s a mixed bag of news,” she said. “No one I think enjoys seeing their school on a party-school list, but by the same token, once you read through what the Princeton Review has written, it’s hard to deny that these are some of the very same things that we pride ourselves on — making a large Big Ten school feel very at ease and at home for students and creating an environment where students feel like they are getting a great education for a great price.”

Nothing like the booze-soaked atmosphere of UI to make you feel at home.

Bruce Pearl, the former basketball coach, received a $950,000 buyout, just one of many the school was paying. [Jimmy] Hyams reports “two football coaches, three basketball coaches, two athletic directors and two baseball coaches” were on the books last year because of a series of personnel changes.

Also:

[T]he school amassed $200 million in debt for construction costs to build multiple athletic facilities and is spending on average $21 million a year.

A little background on why UT athletics has a four million dollar deficit.

UT: UTmost dipshits.

People tend to be at their most fragile at the beginning of their freshman year. The transition can be overwhelming.

For some of the most fragile people, it can simply be too much.

UD begins her fall semester teaching this morning. This afternoon, she has tea with Jihene, a Tunisian scholar whose research stay at George Washington University UD sponsored. This evening, UD leafs through her old copy of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. She has been asked to talk about the book at a Harvard event next month marking its twenty-fifth anniversary.

A full day. But somehow UD will find time to blog.

One day in the near future, [Andrew] Zimbalist says everyone will wake up and realize what is obvious: There is an excess of college football on TV, a surfeit of networks to show it and even more obscure networks launching.

The market could become oversaturated and the multitude of games would attract smaller, niche audiences that won’t command as much in advertising dollars. Rights fees would either plateau or peak and fall.

“College athletics would have to adjust to that reality,” Zimbalist said.

They would have to scale back, not to pre-’84 levels, a drastic and likely impossible turn away from commercialism.

… is here. (Registration required.)

I now have over a thousand students.

The lecture is about T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Virginia” —

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.

The wildly controversial prostate-specific antigen test (PSA) continues to be the subject of studies and debates. Does it help prevent prostate cancer, or is its use actually destructive, subjecting people to unnecessary surgeries? Results and opinions vary too widely, at the moment, to conclude anything with certainty.

Yet the expression of opinions about it would seem fundamental to medical school professors involved in the issue, and you’d think a respectable school like the University of California Davis would encourage its faculty to be part of the debate.

Yet Davis, already dealing with one med school fiasco, now has another, because a dean there got so angry at a professor’s published disapproval of PSA that he told him

he would be punished in two ways. First, he would lose his position in the doctoring program [a special training program he’d put together], and second, he would lose the funding support for a Hungarian student exchange program that he organized.

Why so angry?

Well, money’s involved. The doctor decided to write an anti-PSA opinion piece when he realized that a seminar at Davis was “primarily a sales pitch about the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, and that its main message was that men should get tested regularly beginning at age 40.” University seminars aren’t supposed to be homes for hucksters, especially when what they’re selling might hurt people. I mean, of course it happens, as in this case at the University of Toronto; but it’s not supposed to happen. Not to mention that professors have a right to say what they like without deans and university lawyers making threats against them, as they did in this case.

They’re keeping med schools open, but that’s pretty much it. The entire sector is state-funded (the state wants to open things up to privatization, but the unions say no), so I guess the state can go ahead and kill it. Behind this astonishing event lie months of strikes by professors and students, and behind those strikes of course lie years of complex civil unrest.

Sri Lanka had better be careful. Enough of this and its people will begin to resemble the citizenry of Nevada.