[T]he professors urging us to put away our laptops in favor of pens and notebooks may have a legitimate concern. After all, we go to college to learn from our professors; perhaps we should eliminate the monitor screen standing in the way.

In West Virginia, state Sen. Evan Jenkins said flights on discount airlines between Huntington, W. Va., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. [pill mills] have been dubbed the “Oxycontin Express.”

… reads a banner that keeps popping up at high-traffic locations on the campus of Brown University. It’s there to greet the trustees, who met a few days ago on campus. And to, you know, get some discussion going.

The banner targets one trustee in particular:

Steven Rattner ’74 P’10 P’13 …has settled allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Attorney General’s Office that he performed illegal favors to garner business for the private investment firm Quadrangle Group by paying multi-million dollar fines and accepting temporary bans from the securities industry.

Here’s an article that evokes the larger world of which Rattner is a part. The students are right to ask whether these sorts of people should be closely associated with universities. A couple of excerpts:

… Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was … embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been fined or jailed — not even Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, Goldman’s outrageous Euro-douche who gleefully e-mailed a pal about the “surreal” transactions in the middle of a meeting with the firm’s victims. In a similar case, a sales executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC.

… [It’s] a closed and corrupt system, a timeless circle of friends that virtually guarantees a collegial approach to the policing of high finance.

… You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It’s not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they’re sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let’s not even make them say they’re sorry. That’s too mean; let’s just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don’t make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don’t ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What’s next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don’t feel real; you don’t see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They’re crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let’s steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy.

Instead of selling PhDs in a snap through online for-profit outfits – the way we do in the States – the Germans take the cumbersome “doctorate consultant” route:

… The consultants demand anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 euros to help aspiring doctorate holders with all the formalities and contacts needed to be accepted into a Ph.D. program – and more.

It’s the “more” that can cause problems, however. Doctorate consultants specialize in providing assistance in labor-intensive areas such as research and writing – tasks Ph.D. aspirants are normally expected to master on their own.

… [The firm] ACAD Write …employs around 250 staff and serves a customer base of 1,500. “Our clients are mostly managers, lawyers and others in the medical profession, who have little time. We help them optimize their time to earn a Ph.D….”

Well, the Germans will figure out that there’s a better, cheaper, quicker way to do it, and these firms will go under.

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It’s strange to think of a long, totally simulacral academic career, isn’t it? You buy all of your undergraduate papers; someone writes your doctoral thesis; firms like DesignWrite do all your publications; you outsource your grading to India… What am I forgetting? Is there any degree or activity associated with being an academic you can’t now just buy, or fob off on someone else, or onto some machine? Teaching? Teaching is showing films, having guest lecturers, organizing the kids into in-class discussion groups, having them present papers… And, if you really can’t avoid actually physically being in a room and talking, there’s always reading off of PowerPoints.

We don’t know who will write the definitive book about academia for our century. But we know what its title will be: She’s Not There.

… Anna Nicole, based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith:

[Can] a piece that celebrates the vacuity of contemporary American life – and to a depressing extent, our own – …rise above vacuity itself?

“… I don’t use PowerPoint in class because I want to be ‘out there’ in the classroom — I want the material to feel new each time I present it, even if it is material I teach all the time,” Aiken said.

An award-winning teacher at Arizona State University, on PowerPoint.

Brown University trustee Steven A. Cohen continues to attract a lot of attention. Bloomberg asked an expert to track his company’s trading patterns:

At Bloomberg’s request, Houman Shadab, an associate professor at New York Law School, reviewed SAC’s holdings in stocks that federal prosecutors have identified as subjects of insider leaks. He also reviewed the government’s complaints against Longueuil and Freeman.

“While the trades by themselves don’t prove insider trading or fraud, they are consistent with patterns federal investigators are examining based on trading of nonpublic information,” Shadab said in an interview Feb. 8.

Brown University students are beginning to wonder…

… cutting tree limbs overhead, trying to take down dead branches from the big snow storm.**

But that’s not important. Forget that. Forget that, in Stage One of its extensive lumber-liquidation chez UD, David Gregg’s Tree Removal Service is out there stripping our front oak. A grizzled man in a green tee sits in an open cab at the end of an Altec truck-mounted crane shaving and shaving…

But listen up. James saw this and sent it to UD. It’s written by a colleague of Mr UD’s at the University of Maryland. Read it all. Excerpts:

The culture of football worship [at universities] has gotten so out of control that I think the only solution is to get rid of it entirely…. [W]e need to eliminate football entirely from our universities if we want to maintain our pre-eminent position as the world’s scientific and technological leader.

He says everything UD‘s been saying ever since she opened shop. He gives a local example.

At the University of Maryland last year, the football coach fell out of favor with the athletic director, who wanted to replace him. (This despite the fact that the coach was very successful, with an overall winning record.) The problem was, he had one more year to go in his contract, and the university would have to pay him a cool $2 million if they fired him. U. Maryland doesn’t exactly have money to burn: for three years running, it has imposed furloughs on all employees and prohibited all raises, including cost-of-living increases. So you’d think that blowing $2 million to pay a coach to sit on the sidelines, and paying who-knows-how-much to hire a new coach, would be out of the question.

Nope. The brand-new President of the university, in office just one month, announced the hiring of a new coach, along with a $2 million payout to the old coach.

The author is afraid to write the thing. He’s scared. He says twice that he knows he’s going to get himself into trouble, attacking fabulous, fabulous football. Already he’s got commenters up the wazoo telling him he’s the Antichrist.

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** Inspiration for this post’s title here.

Talking about the Ralph Ellison novel with my American Lit students yesterday, I suddenly remembered a story Mr UD’s father used to tell.

The version I told the students was the one I happened to remember; later that evening, Mr UD gave me a more accurate account.

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An officer in the Polish army in the Second World War, Jerzy Soltan was captured by the Germans in 1939 and put in Murnau, a prisoner of war camp for these officers.

Let’s set the scene.

In the early afternoon [of April 29, 1945], on the orders of a German officer, Captain Pohl, the 40 or so camp guards relinquished control of the watchtowers and handed in their weapons. [The camp commanders knew the Americans were on their way.] Then, at around 3 p.m., as the American Army approached the town of Murnau from the north, a small group of cars with SS men approached the camp from the opposite direction. When the Germans and the Americans met just outside the front gate of the camp, gunfire erupted. Most of the SS cars turned around and fled back to town, but the lead car opened fire, which brought even heavier fire from the medium-tank platoon and their 76mm guns. Two SS men, Colonel Teichmann and Captain Widmann, were killed in the exchange of fire, as prisoners in the camp climbed on the front fence and watched the proceedings, cheering the Americans on. Also killed by a stray bullet during the exchange of fire was 2nd Lt. Alfons Mazurek, one of the prisoners.

Jerzy Soltan stood among the prisoners at the front gates, watching. To his left, he saw pull up a huge, shiny, Horch, inside of which sat an elegant SS man. To his right, Soltan saw trucks approach Murnau’s entry.

As he looked at the SS man, “I saw that suddenly he had been transformed into a general!” Come again? “His uniform suddenly went from green to red!”

Soltan wasn’t being funny. The moment was so surreal – liberation? death? – that this was simply the thought that came into his head.

A moment later he realized the SS man had been shot to pieces by the Americans in the trucks.

But where were the Americans? No one was driving the oncoming trucks. “They were black. I couldn’t really see them. I had never seen a black person.”

In the aftermath of a Brandeis student’s suicide, a professor speaks.

[T]hroughout the memorial, many expressed their exasperation at the senselessness of [Kat] Sommers’ death.

Professor Sabine von Mering … spoke about how Sommers had come to her office hours the previous week to help plan a trip for the class. Von Mering said she was about to read Sommers’ paper for her class when she received the news of her suicide.

“Is it us? Are we making people show us a face?” von Mering asked. “You have to know that the faculty does not expect you to show a face. If you do that, we cannot help you…”

[The German Defense Minister] told a swarm of reporters enquiring about the plagiarism allegations swirling around him: “I will temporarily – I repeat temporarily – give up my doctoral title.”

[Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg] will do so, he said, while the university that gave him the doctorate completes its investigation into whether it really was all his own work.

Inherit one title, inherit another.

… for so long on forming a government that university students there have begun stripping in protest.

… José Cruz about the for profits:

Inaction is not an option. We have to rein in those that abuse our social investment and prey on our underserved population.

… just got even sicker.

I can’t tell you how much UD laughed when she realized that the going cliché among pushers of big time university sports is sports are the front porch of the American university. You want to see a big sports university’s front porch? Check out the piss-filled entryways of all the University of Georgia buildings after any tailgate.

This guy says the tree poisoning is symbolic of professional as well as university sports. True. But check it out: University sports get amazing tax subsidies. They take huge amounts of money away from academics and impoverish undergraduates through high athletic fees. They make the admissions and retention process a sick joke.

They play to ugly, invidious emotions, and generate endless sick behaviors.

You don’t think so? You think I’m overstating? Right, because no one says what I’m saying until the next, sicker thing happens. When the next, sicker thing happens, everybody says what I’m saying.

UD‘s excited. UD has a thing about the northern lights. (For years she’s been trying to put together a trip to Iceland or whatever to see them.)

Don’t worry. She’s prepared to be disappointed this evening. But she’ll be out there looking.