… comments.

Ho hum, guys are dumb.

Then there’s “the $500,000 in guaranteed annual compensation that Maryland is paying its new offensive coordinator, Mike Locksley.”

Locksley! The beautiful Mike Locksley! How degraded can a university get?

The purple flowers have just begun to emerge on the buddleja by my office window, and already – this moment – a hummingbird is checking it out.

Looks like this.

Intense green. Hard, determined black eyes. A long thin beak deep in the flower.

The impossible white flutter of madly beating wings.

… but it’s pretty clear that there are at least two groups of clever people out there actively checking your letters and numbers, your words and your music, your alpha and omega. So don’t be paranoid, but look sharp.

There are all those Germans with their plagiarism-detection websites… They’ve taken down a defense minister and many other high-ranking people and they’re definitely still at it.

And then there are statisticians like Uri Simonsohn. Uri’s a young Wharton professor who checks out your numbers and on finding them bogus destroys your career.

That may sound harsh, but do we really want social psychologists feeding us all sorts of bullshit all the time and gaining fancy professorships thereby? I don’t think people should be rewarded for taking advantage of our propensity to believe anything.

That’s a headline in today’s University of Georgia newspaper. Story includes a big ol’ picture of Georgia’s outgoing president, who’s also an NCAA honcho (he was on the short list to replace Myles Brand as head of the organization).

Although the story doesn’t pick up on it, the headline touches on the Southeastern Conference, and how it’s real unlikely you’re gonna see a woman president from an SEC school.

And why is that?

Because the SEC schools (with one exception: Vanderbilt) are all football factories, and in order to stay in operation the foreman must be male. With a woman you run the risk of hiring an egghead.

… about the Affordable Care Act decision. The first announcement we heard said it was a goner; now it’s clear that it’s going to go forward. Mr UD pores over the SCOTUS blog; UD listens as he reads from the decision as it’s published.

Martin Amis says:

History has speeded up in the last generation, and that is antithetical to poetry. What a poem does, what a lyric poem does, is stop the clock and say we’re going to examine this moment. Shh! Stop the clock. And people are too hyper for that now. They don’t like to stop the clock. The clock is running too fast for them.

And also, a huge part of poetry is self-communion. When you read a poem, you’re communing with yourself in a deep way. People don’t like that. Why do you think they’re on their phones all the time? They don’t like being alone. They’re like children; they get all frantic if they’re alone, they feel lost. So people go around mumbling to their associates. And it’s not an introspective culture. They talk about dumbing down, but there’s also such a thing as numbing down. They don’t want to be sensitive.

If he’s right, summer would be the most poetic season, with winter coming in second, and autumn and spring tied for last. Summer’s the quietest, most becalmed, most stop-clocked of seasons – and thus the likeliest to prompt in poet and reader the hushed arrested introspective examination that generates the lyric. As in:

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

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Wallace Stevens never gets any verbal liftoff at all here. The poem’s a few repeated monosyllabic words, a few repeated phrases. A reader in a house becomes lost in her book – became the book – became, with its echo of calm, becalmed; the distance from became to book is not all that great… book is the first syllable of became.

Not just summer – that’s not quiet and calm enough – summer night. Even calmer, quieter. As James Agee writes:

High summer holds the earth.

So introspective, so private is the setting that not only the reader’s self falls away, but also the physical pages and binding of the book itself, so that its expressive being, its entire meaning, floats out onto – becomes – the night air. The summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

But the reader still wants to lean — the word is so close to learn that one almost reads it like that — over the book, wants the words to stay on the page and to be a thing that the reader can in a scholarly analytical way shape into Truth.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

So here the summer night would be not the pure emanation of human expressivity, or let’s be even more ambitious and say the music of the spheres, but rather the perfected form of an unassailable philosophical truth the reader has gleaned from leaning over the book.

The reading, truth-seeking mind finds perfect outward conditions for the generation of perfect truth from the page: The world entirely quiets itself to allow truth to assume language. The profound silence of the summer night, from this point of view, would be the unanswerable “articulation” of the truth of being.

The reader, in other words, is someone who demands a verbally articulated Truth that she must lean over, glean, and learn, rather than someone who simply accepts a naturally, earthily articulated conscious being.

The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

The reader herself, as part of this calm world, is meaning – is the only meaning there is. The truth of this calm world is its pointless inarticulable pulsing being. The book has meaning, but the world only has being. The book, the reader of the book – these are meaning generators, meaning seekers. They project meaning into the world. But the world itself – which the utter silence and immobility of the summer night reveals – is meaningless.

The Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia has banned laptops, etc., in classrooms.

“Feedback from the professors has been very positive. There is a completely different atmosphere in the lectures and seminars. Discussion and communication with instructors has significantly improved,” said [an administrator]. “To be honest, it is difficult to understand why we didn’t do it earlier.”

… now has eight hundred students.

… of this sort of thing (background here and here). Their universities sponsor events in which speakers call for the death of homosexuals, and where women can’t speak, and are segregated in some other room from the men. Now Ottawa’s Carleton University is dealing with the aftermath of having sponsored an event in honor of Khomeini. A group of Iranian-Canadian professors have written a letter to Carleton’s president protesting the event:

… Clearly, this “conference”, organized by a group of people associated with the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, does not have academic value and cannot provide an objective analysis of Khomeini’s thoughts and particularly their outcome.

… [R]eputable academic institutions have a moral obligation not to turn a blind eye on atrocities committed against their colleagues in other countries. Providing forum to individuals, who under the pretext of academic freedom, propagate the ideas and values of a regime that is known for its violation of all standards of academic freedom and rights, is far from promoting academic debates.

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… [A speaker at the conference,] Kurt Anders Richardson, at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, … said Khomeini “was the one who emphasized the equality of human beings, the equality of male and female.” …

In an interview with Maclean’s after the conference, Richardson said he has received a lot of criticism from Iranian émigrés in Canada since making those comments and said he had based them on Khomeini’s writings, rather than his actions.

Oh! Okay then.

… with apocalypse.

Her writing was snappy, funny, hip, over the top, confiding… This essay about having small breasts is echt Ephron. She was desperate from a young age to be a visibly womanly woman, a woman — she quotes that hideous song from Annie Get Your Gun — “as soft and as sweet as a nursery.” For that, she needed very visible breasts, but hers never grew. She wore tiny ridiculous bras, then padded bras. A friend tries to cheer her up:

“When you get married,” Libby explained, “your husband will touch your breasts and rub them and kiss them and they’ll grow.”

But “no one would ever want to marry me. I had no breasts. I would never have breasts.”

She describes, throughout her life, “a never-ending stream of women who have made competitive remarks to me about breast size.” She remains “obsessed by breasts. … If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person.” Breasts are “the hang-up of my life.”

One nice thing about her breast essay is that it unexpectedly becomes more cranky and crazy and obsessed about the subject. Usually essays like these describe maturing into equanimity about a particular fixation, or experiencing some breakthrough moment that calms you down about it. Not Ephron’s.

Breasty friends of Ephron’s claim that the ridicule and unwelcome attention they’ve endured is worse than her small-breasted misery. She responds, by way of concluding her essay: “I think they are full of shit.”

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She’s right about that, by the way. They are full of shit. To have generous pretty breasts is a great thing – a source of erotic pleasure, obviously, and – given that Ephron shared a breast obsession with a billion or so men – a powerful attractor.

The board just voted unanimously to reinstate her.

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This is not a surprising outcome. Students and faculty deserve, on this beautiful summer day, to celebrate, and I’m sure they will. They responded strongly and immediately to what really does seem to have been an attempted coup.

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I actually think this story was au fond about human rather than university values.

Remember the famous letter that guy who quit Goldman Sachs wrote? (“[I]f you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.”) That thing was everywhere — New York Times and everywhere. Remember? Everyone was talking about it. Why?

Because nobody really wants to become a vampire squid. Some people want to become rich and powerful, but few – beyond a scattering of psychopaths – like the idea of reviewing their lives at the end of days and realizing that all that time they were Lloyd Blankfein. We live in a capitalist economy and a competitive culture, and we all deal with that in various ways; but it’s terribly important to us that there be locations in our country where exclusively market-driven values do not dominate.

Teresa Sullivan is a typical, traditional university president in that she is always trying to balance bottom line exigencies with the university’s higher calling, its status as one of the rare places in the United States where serious people gather to do something other than engage in commercial trade. She lives in the world of humane studies. Humane. Humanistic. Having to do with human beings, and bringing to human beings moral as well as intellectual seriousness. Evolving a sense of the diversity, complexity and vulnerability of human beings — think of all those literature courses — and ultimately perhaps evolving a way of dealing with other human beings that reflects an understanding of diversity, complexity, and vulnerability.

The moguls on the board of visitors at U Va were – to put it very simply – cruel. They gave no thought to the vulnerability of Teresa Sullivan; they simply summoned her and bullied her out of a job. They humiliated her. It is not enough to succeed; others must fail, says La Rochefoucauld. That is the world outside — and, sadly, to some extent, inside — the university. When it reveals itself with such clarity as it just did at one of our greatest public universities, our anxieties over what we’re turning into at the highest financial levels of our culture — amoral acquisitive people who positively enjoy hurting others — we respond with great vehemence, as the Goldman Sachs guy who couldn’t take it anymore did.

I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding.

We all know it’s eroding; and we all know that it continues to be the case that the people who are the most eroded get the biggest rewards. Most of us want in some instinctive way to protect our universities from that process of erosion. When messengers from that world emerge into sunlight, we pounce. It’s the only thing to do.

… the NPR program Fresh Air interviews Kevin Carey on American universities.

… but don’t forget the even more scandalous Southern Illinois University group, presided over by pitiable president-for-life Glenn Poshard. (Put his name in my search engine for years of background.) U Va’s misery will probably end today; SIU’s trustees are the gift that keeps on giving.

You can sense this student journalist trying to grapple with the Beckettian absurdity of her school’s inept president and non-functional trustees as everyone fights with everyone – in public. “It’s just plain bullshit, and he knows it. He is only trying to deflect the truth of what’s going on at that university.” That’s the recent chair of the board talking about the president of the university.

Read the whole article if you want to get the particular piquancy that is the SIU leadership at work: A combination of emotional immaturity, political hackery, and organizational cluelessness.