Satan-slayer.

[Brian Tamanaha] also takes aim at the claim of law professors that their high salaries and low teaching loads (relative to other academics) are justified by the revenue they forgo when they enter the academy. No, he replies. Not only is “our pay far better than that of other professors,” not only do we have lifetime security and hours of work that are “whatever we want them to be,” but “our quality of life is far better than that of lawyers and we make more money than most lawyers.”

… Home.

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Holy Autocracy, Batman! Word’s getting around!

The University of Georgia is a strange sad place on the best of days, a sports- and booze-sodden universe, its lawns scattered with the remains of the last tailgate… But even by its own surreal standards, the theft of a forklift kind of pushes the envelope…

They’ve been looking for the thing for a month… It weighs 22,000 pounds and was, the university announced today, stolen by a university employee. (What’d he do? Drive it out?)

The article doesn’t say whether the university recovered the forklift…

How do you hide a forklift? Did he sell it?

Bowling Green University has Metamorphosis, a sculpture its students have decided is a limestone vagina; and now Wasilla High School has Warrior Within, which (despite the artists’ insistence that it conveys moral virtue and the fighting spirit) the students have identified as a concrete vagina.

The artists propose educational seminars in which students are instructed in the proper reading of their sculpture, but this strikes UD as rather inimical to the spirit of art. Outside of North Korea.

In the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman comment thread, the locals weigh in (“I see a turtle.”). Some of them note the irony that the principal’s placement of a large tarp over the controversial sculpture now makes the work look like a penis with a condom on it.

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UPDATE:

The intellectual concept behind the Lincoln Trilogy is more successful than the visual relationship of the three figures. The combination of three distinctly individual sculptures of differing scale and spatial orientation has resulted in a somewhat awkward interrelationship.

That’s one way of putting it.
Bill, a UD reader, sent
UD some photos he took
of the statue being described here.
It’s in honor of Abraham Lincoln.

The dignity and glory of the university.

The arrest record under Meyer was embarrassing and already nine [University of Florida] players have been arrested under Muschamp. It’s no coincidence that eight of those nine players were either recruited by Meyer or committed to Meyer before Muschamp took the job.

Today, it all comes down to which coach gets nailed for the rap sheet. Alma mater, ’tis to thee!

The Australian commenter posing this question can look over here, at the States, to see what a national sedation policy might look like.

Not that every one of us has been zoned by Zeneca… mummified by Merck… Lalalanded by Lilly… but, you know, tens of millions of Americans have gotten there, and – out-of-it-wise – we’re way more advanced than the Aussies. Our best poets sing of it:

Let us go then, you and I,
Where America is spread out against the sky
Like a nation etherized upon a table…

In one particular way, Australia looked for awhile as though it might overtake us – i.e., in government-sponsored anti-psychotic dosing of children without psychotic symptoms.

To be sure, we’ve got Joseph Biederman (type his name into this blog’s search engine and enjoy).

But Australia’s got Patrick McGorry who, until he (under pressure from scientists around the world) abandoned the idea, thought it might be clever to experiment with giving fifteen-year-olds he determined to be “pre-psychotic” powerful antipsychotic drugs. Some people thought it wasn’t too cool to give “children who had not yet been diagnosed with a psychotic illness…. drugs with potentially dangerous side effects.” So last summer McGorry dropped the idea.

And now – under equally strong pressure from an outraged scientific community, McGorry has gone one step further.

Concerns about the overmedication of young people and rigid models of diagnosis have led the architect of early intervention in Australian psychiatry, Patrick McGorry, to abandon the idea pre-psychosis should be listed as a new psychiatric disorder.

The former Australian of the Year had previously accepted the inclusion of pre-psychosis – a concept he and colleagues developed – in the international diagnostic manual of mental disorders, or DSM, which is being updated this year.

Drug companies must be mildly dismayed. (Only mildly, because they’ll find a way around this.) Popular American news shows are pointing out that for most people anti-depressants are placebos with serious side effects. Critics are attacking the idea of a grief pill. And now the packed-with-potential idea of pre-psychosis (who ain’t pre-? and when will they figure out that an even niftier idea is clinically pre-neurotic?) is being savaged simply because some people think giving symptom-free people immensely powerful drugs is unethical!

Zoom in on the bigger picture here, if you will. Through incessant advertising, and through incentivized research professors at our universities, the drug industry is slowly rebuilding our basic human self-appraisals. We simply cannot get through life without pills.

… about technotrash in the classroom, UD stumbles upon this.

“The result of this ‘social media revolution,’ is a mass movement of people who stare at their screens engaging in mindless chatter and mesmerized window-shopping,” said [Timothy] Dansdill. “Their outlandish, subversive claim that ‘sharing information’ and sending and receiving ‘messages’ is essential for creating and sustaining social and emotional intelligence … is deeply damaging to the simple, but powerful human acts of face to face conversation, solitary reading, writing, and reflection, and the shared making of actual knowledge.”

Sometimes you have to hold your nose and keep reading. Sometimes, as Martha’s George says, “you gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.”

And the more responsible news outlets – like the Boston Globe – are doing just that, using words like alleged, account, and report.

Remember Francisco Nava. Remember Kerri Dunn. I could go on. I’ve been covering – for years – people at universities who stage (or are accused of having staged) hate crimes against themselves. So notorious is this behavior – self-generated physical and other attacks – that it inspired a play – Spinning into Butter.

This woman might indeed have been attacked. But many of these stories turn out to be hoaxes.

… an “explosive” segment on anti-depressants as no better than placebos for the vast majority of people taking them? Will it be, as promised, explosive? Harvard’s Irving Kirsch will talk about his research, featured in The Emperor’s New Clothes: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth – another promised explosion. Marcia Angell’s review of his and other books on the subject in the New York Review of Books was also, I guess, explosive… But so far that essay prompted only a flaccid little response from Peter Kramer in the New York Times.

We’ve heard nothing from the companies that make billions of dollars off the sale of do-nothing, stuffed-with-side-effects drugs except for what they told Stahl: They work. Kramer said the same thing: “[I]t is dangerous for the press to hammer away at the theme that antidepressants are placebos. They’re not.”

Dangerous!

But why are Kramer and company doing little other than repeating, while speaking darkly of risk, that antidepressants work?

Et alors. I’m not sure major attention even of the sort 60 Minutes represents will constitute a bombshell. Positions here are and have long been entrenched, and you don’t exactly kiss goodbye a ten billion dollar enterprise without a struggle.

And millions of Americans – despite witnessing an extremely loud and incredibly close prescription pill epidemic – seem wedded to a sense of themselves as chemically dependent. Indeed to a sense of life itself as the sort of thing you need Prozac to pursue.

… by cynical commercial interests in this country strengthens as the new Diagnostic Manual, with its piling up and pilling up on simple mourning, looms. What can we do to soften this latest blow to our emotional privacy, our right to our sorrow?

“I have my own cosmology of pain,” protests the writer Bill Gray in Don DeLillo’s novel, Mao II: ” Leave me alone with it.” But America’s famous pathetic drug deaths, coming in now at the rate of about one every couple of months, pierce through any denial we might entertain about the polis of polypharmacy, everyone here, it seems, a dispenser or devotee of anti-experience chemicals.

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –

That was Emily Dickinson, expressing the sympathetic curiosity we all have about the grieving – wondering if the grief of others is like our grief; wondering about its origins, its intensity, its nature. Grief – the clean honest passion that hurled John Marcher, finally, onto the grave of his beloved and thereby told him, finally, of that love… Like Dickinson, he looks directly into the eyes of a fellow mourner at the cemetery, and he sees what grief is – he sees the having loved deeply that elicits it:

The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?

We scrutinize our grief; we scrutinize the grief of others. We know that our grief is in some way – a way of which we can be proud – a measure of the love we were able to experience and express.

And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary –

To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they’re mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like my own –

Marcher, Dickinson, all of us: We observe the grief of others, and the grief that is our own. And from that we derive along with pain, comfort. Comfort because the grief of others, whatever its source, is mostly like our own — the capacity to grieve is in itself a form of reassurance, an admission into the human theater, an instance of solidarity, an encounter with what’s most valuable, really, in ourselves, and in others.

Yet now we read those initial lines differently:

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –

Those are our pill dispensers, our under-informed, over-worked family doctors, glancing at the latest DSM on their desk as they measure our grief with narrow eyes and write a prescription for the Xanax on which Whitney Houston was so dependent.

It’s not enough merely to protest, as Allen Frances and so many others are eloquently and ceaselessly doing, pharma’s theft of what’s most intimate and what’s best about us. We have to remind ourselves what grief is.

What’s it like to be director of communications for the most scandal-ridden university in… I dunno… the world? How long do you keep that job, how long do you keep your sanity, before the whirlwind of arrests, cheating, fights, fake courses, and violations (I’m only mentioning sports-related stuff because nothing non-sports-related happens at Auburn) blows you over, and you have to quit?

Today’s challenge for Clardy involves the Dean of the Ag School, picked up for drunk driving this morning.

It’s humiliating enough that Massachusetts taxpayers subsidize absurdly overcrowded lectures; they also have to pay for the consequences of U Mass’s large number of violent drunks. These guys like to get together on a regular basis and destroy the campus and attack people and shit. So taxpayers pay for cleanup…

But now look. After a round of student arrests and expulsions in the wake of the last riot (I think it’s the last; I need to put a Google News Alert on this one), one of the expelled is suing for damages. If he can help just one other guy avoid the drunken mayhem to which he was driven by that school, it’ll be worth it.

But much as we can sympathize with this particular litigator, UD‘s main point is a hard-nosed financial one. Shouldn’t the state legislature be asking how much it’ll cost when all thirteen (there are only thirteen now, but the police are looking for many more) arrested students sue for damages? Time to put the school out of its misery. The glories of online education (we’re assured by many people that it’s better than face-to-face) stand ready to solve this problem.

And some, ol’ UD can’t help concluding, are just spectacularly, consistently, shockingly, stupid. You sort of feel as though they mean well, and that they have a shaky though sincere sense of what a university is… sort of… And that if you met the folks in the administration you’d say Hale fellow well met! and definitely enjoy the sincere handshake this person would offer.

But one of the trustees holds a diploma mill degree and anyway many of them never show up for meetings… And there’s just a general sense of malaise because they don’t have funds to pay faculty much of anything but they have ten million dollars to give to a new sports arena, only they lie about taking that money from university funds… until they can’t lie anymore because a local journalist won’t let them… and the new president (stupid universities have major president-turnover) instead of saying all the serious and good things he could say by way of acknowledging and trying to right things, etc., says Hey don’t look at me I just got here!

There’s just a no one’s home, not much going on upstairs feel to places like Central Michigan University… a laxity… as in that Dickinson poem… first chill, then stupor, then the letting go…

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UPDATE: There are two detailed comments from CMU faculty members on this post’s comment thread. Take a look.

Sex is more special in an Audi 6.