Stanford’s Henry H. Jones. A life outrageously well-lived.

Okay, so that’s one North Carolina taxpayer unhappy to be subsidizing a diploma mill.

We’ll keep count here at University Diaries.

… at the Empire State Building. A developing story.

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

Chicago.

… to discern the figure in the carpet. …It was invaluable training,” said Ryan Crocker in a recent interview at his college,” in how to think about complex foreign societies.”

But that Henry James short story, which Crocker “analyzed for my senior oral,” concludes with no figure found, its enigma intact.

We interpret stories; we tell stories. We chase down meanings and patterns and plots all our life -in some sense, this is our life – but we never solve the mystery, discern the figure. Tzvetan Todorov puts our rather brutally simple situation this way: “Narrative equals life, absence of narrative, death.”

Crocker’s storied, harrowing diplomatic career has ended, and, as some sort of result, he seems to have fallen apart, having been arrested for DUI and hit and run. Although named as dean of Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, he has not been much in that role. He left to take an ambassadorship, and, for next year, he’ll be a teaching fellow at Yale.

The life Crocker lived for decades pitched him forward from one byzantine, bloody narrative to another – an existence nightmarish, but engrossing and heroic. Now there’s the business of being an ordinary man with nightmares.

Remember this handy phrase when allegations of ghostwriting swirl around high-profile medical school professors, politicians, and pundits. As a rule, the more prominent and celebrated and busy you are, the more likely some of your writing’s being done by other people.

That’s the allegation here, against Fareed Zakaria, who is already dealing with having plagiarized another writer.

… and looks like this little tyke has blown it.

Five handguns, brass knuckles, and a pocketknife.

He’s seventeen years old. Just getting started.

… l’Onion.

Yes, Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes that this sentence is triply redundant (unpredictable, predict, in advance), but it comes from a reasonably thoughtful consideration of suicide. I like the way the guy – a psychiatry professor – says he does understand suicide, even though the meme, the thing, the trope, the conceit, is that suicide’s all enigmatic.

Because it is at its essence a perceptual disorder, [depression] causes one to see the entire world as pain. It feels painful inside, but it also feels painful outside.

When a person is depressed, the entire world is disturbed and distressed, so there is nowhere to escape. And it is this fact that makes suicide so seductive, because it seems to offer the one available escape option.

(Go here for an elaboration on this from David Foster Wallace.)

This writer goes on to say that “the means for committing suicide should be removed from the environment.” He’s talking about the home. We can’t do much about a world brimming with suicide locations.

And yet even as we speak Cornell and NYU, who’ve had suicide clusters, are both futzing with their environment in just this way. Cornell is netting its bridges, and NYU is digitally shielding its high-atrium library.

Heads up, North Dakota! They’re trying to hide him, but he’s right in your neighborhood.

The Board had not been aware until Friday that Potti lost a job earlier this year in South Carolina, according to Houdek. But the Board did look at Potti’s public reprimands from state medical boards in North Carolina and Missouri, as well as the Duke scandal.

When states are desperate for doctors, they’ll take anyone.

It’s true Potti has settled about a dozen malpractice lawsuits from patients, Houdek said…

Background.

AKINMANIA!!!!!

This account from a new biography of Paterno is so icky in so many ways. Paterno tells Penn State’s castrated-by-coaches president he’s not retiring, and he makes clear what the Best Party School lists make clear year after year: At Penn State, it’s all about playgrounds.

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

From another review of the same book:

[E]ven leaving the scandal aside, the coach comes across as a self-mythologizing monster, consumed by his legacy of winning on the football field.

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

UD thanks David for the second link.

… leftover chicken from Nando’s Peri-Peri (there was an ugly fight, last night, over the lemon & herb sauce), and I say to him:

So there’s this town near Tacoma Washington which is on a beautiful bay – Chambers Bay. Pretty name, Chambers Bay, but the town’s name is University Place.

Silence. He’s fiddling with the toaster.

What university, you might ask — you’re supposed at this point to ask — is located in University Place? [Pause. Silence.] And that’s just it. There isn’t a university. Ain’t hide nor hair of a university. When the town was established in the 1800’s the University of Puget Sound thought it might locate there, but then it didn’t and they were stuck with the name. The US Open’s being played there in 2015, and some in the town – including the mayor – think they’d be better able to benefit from all that publicity and possible tourism and all if they were Chambers Bay instead of University Place. Easier to remember, prettier…

Mr UD responds:

Barring some truly important reason, you shouldn’t change names. The absurd fact of that name’s history is part of the lore of the town. Continuity matters. And it costs money to change the names of towns.

UD responds to Mr UD:

Yeah. The reporter interviews this very anti guy, Bill Callier: “He owns University Place Radiator, Mufflers and Brakes.”

The Ute Wars continue among Republicans, with Romney repudiating the orgasmic platform of the same man whose views he embraced quite fervently during his 2008 presidential campaign.

Some, like the professor in my headline, may dismiss these views as nuts. Decide for yourself.

“This is a traumatic thing — she’s, shall we say, she’s uptight,” Dr. [John] Willke said of a woman being raped, adding, “She is frightened, tight, and so on. And sperm, if deposited in her vagina, are less likely to be able to fertilize. The tubes are spastic.”

My plastic spastastic lover!

So that was a couple of years ago at Tennessee State, and as is customary with schools that graduate not much over ten percent of their students in four years, the place since then has sort of kept limping along, barely getting re-accredited in time for more incompetence.

Now the school has devolved into farce, with the head of the faculty senate led away in handcuffs from a meeting about allegations (apparently now disproved) that the administration went into the computer system and changed (improved) student grades. The meeting was also about the results of a faculty survey having to do with whether to dismiss the head of the senate.

But the details are unimportant. These are the sorts of deeply humiliating events which occur in dropout factories.

Oh my. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is going to have to do a much better job of talking about its latest national scandal if it wants to avoid a significantly worse outcome than its preceding scandals.

Here, for instance, in my headline, you have the athletic director candidly pointing out that his athletes, many of whom were admitted to Chapel Hill academically unprepared for it, get to have full-time jobs plus academic work. How do you think that’s going to work out? How ready are you to believe everyone’s protestation of shock – the president is shocked; the faculty is shocked; everyone is shocked – that an entire department (and probably others – wait for that development) corrupted itself on their behalf?

And given that outrageous corruption, isn’t it striking that, as the university newspaper puts it, the department chair behind it all was “asked to retire”?

Asked to retire? Oh Julius sorry to bother you but now that you’ve destroyed us as a serious university (“Every single UNC degree will now be questioned and doubted by potential employers and other universities throughout the nation.” “Every degree earned here is less valuable now than it was a year ago.”) could you please retire? Here’s a spectacular buyout to help you along…

No, UD doesn’t know anything about a buyout. But shouldn’t she? Shouldn’t we all know the conditions under which this man, who along with his assistant (what were her retirement details?), helped destroy the academic reputation of Chapel Hill (as a sports factory with a bit of academic legitimacy, Chapel Hill was already well on its way toward a national joke; after all, Chapel Hill spawned the AFAM department under Julius Nyang’oro), was asked to retire?

Of course if they were paid big bucks to go away, we know, more or less, where that money came from. Big-time sports at Chapel Hill generate so much cash. Can’t have your football players jeopardizing that money by taking classes. You didn’t admit them to educate them.