… there’s always some little old lady who rises to iconic sucker status? There’s always some little old lady who explains in a tremulous voice how this nice man called her up on the telephone and was so sweet and patient with her and now he has the $150,000 she’d put away for her dotage…

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill looks like that old lady. Now that its latest disastrous football coach has retired, UNC is the sucker du jour.

Although the news came out yesterday that new Bucs coach Greg Schiano has hired his old friend and colleague Butch Davis, there have been conflicting reports about precisely what role Davis will have in Tampa Bay. And the reason for the conflicting reports appears to be an issue regarding Davis wanting to collect paychecks from the Bucs while also collecting all the severance pay he can from the University of North Carolina.

North Carolina fired Davis in July amid an NCAA investigation into academic misconduct and accusations that players received impermissible benefits from agents. According to the Tampa Bay Times, when Davis was fired the school agreed to give him up to $2.7 million in severance. (Because giving $2.7 million to a football coach who was fired amid a scandal is a great way for a public university to use its resources.)

Davis has already received $933,000 of that severance, but the rest of it comes in increments of $590,000 a year in 2013, 2014 and 2015 — but only if Davis is unable to find a coaching job. If Davis has resumed his coaching career, North Carolina can deduct his coaching salary from that $590,000, and if his coaching salary is more than $590,000 North Carolina doesn’t have to pay him anything.

So Davis is apparently hoping to work out a title with the Buccaneers in which he will “serve the Bucs in an advisory capacity” rather than become a coach, and therefore he’d be able to get paid by the Bucs while still collecting his full severance from North Carolina.

Haha Butch boy put ‘er there! Gotta hand it to you!

And what a boon it is for the kiddies! No one to bother them with conversation, or, I don’t know, human activity, of any sort… Just left all alone in their rooms… For years and years and years…

Some old bugger from Boulder – Boulder! tree-hugger city! – wonders how many internet internees “survive the boredom and isolation of school on a laptop” and actually graduate (their cyber-keepers make drop-out stats hard to get). He reviews the scandals that occur when teachers are air traffic controllers and administrators hedgies.

Like a lot of people, this guy is beginning to notice the class-based nature of school on a laptop.

Slick TV ads and corporate hucksters would have us believe the online school can teach even better than the best traditional elementary and secondary schools the nation has to offer. Yeah, right. The day that Phillips Exeter Academy replaces its teachers with laptops is the day I might start to believe them.

More and more people realize that online school represents a perfect 1%/99% matchup – it makes the first group even richer, and keeps the second group in the pointless nothingness which is its lot in life.

See the images on the Exeter website? This is how I spend my day, says the featured student. Out and about in nature with my buddies, and then engrossed in fascinating classroom discussion… This is the best education possible, and your public school will in various ways of course fall short of it. But your cyber school? LOL.

… David Lynch to tell you that the weirdest shit in America goes down not in Washington DC, Land o’ Elites (Republican voters this time around seem determined to elect a President who’s never visited, let alone worked, in DC), but in what William Gass called the heart of the heart of the country (Lynch was born in Missoula).

In many years of blogging about universities, UD’s never seen one more unsettling, more surreal, than North Dakota’s Dickinson State. Here’s a post, from last year, about this school – its president at that time was hiding out from administrators trying to boot him from his office (his physical office – though fired, he refused to go)… The same president pioneered the ‘physical capture’ enrollment technique (maintain healthy numbers by enrolling anyone who, for whatever reason, even for a second, crosses into campus territory — a kind of eminent domain for the state of North Dakota involving human bodies instead of private property)…

Dickinson State fell out of the news for a few months – they seem to have convinced the president to get out – but crazy shit was still churning away, and now it’s hit the fan. For ten years the place has had a program for Chinese students – actual name, not kidding, Top Up, and Disney – where they bring these people over for seven months at Walt Disney World, and six at Dickinson State … dueling surrealities… I mean, imagine someone from China whose only exposure to the States is Dickinson State University, North Dakota, and Walt Disney World, Orlando…

Although Dickinson got rid of the eminent domain guy, the same enrollment approach – rope ’em any old way – has pertained, with Dickinson-deputized agents trolling China, telling people who can’t speak English that they can go to the United States and play in a theme park and get a degree.

That ain’t all. Things have taken on a real Blue Velvet tint with the suicide of a guy who’s maybe been running the show:

… Douglas LaPlante, 59, dean of education, business and applied sciences, was … found dead near a city park, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the Dickinson police said in a statement.

From Andrew Sullivan:

Oklahoma legislators introduced a bill yesterday that says “the life of each human being begins at conception.” But state Sen. Constance Johnson, a Democrat, decided that the bill, SB 1433, didn’t go far enough to protect unborn children. Johnson added an amendment to the bill, posted online by The Lost Ogle, that says life actually begins at ejaculation: “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

From Virginia:

Irked by abortion bill, Va. senator adds rectal exams for men

The state Senate this afternoon gave preliminary approval for legislation that would require pregnant women to undergo ultrasound imaging before an abortion, but not before rejecting a Democratic senator’s attempt to add what she described as “a little gender equity” to the bill. Democrat Janet Howell of Fairfax County proposed requiring men to undergo a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra. “This is a matter of basic fairness,” Howell said…. “It’s requiring [women] to have unnecessary medical procedures, it’s adding to the cost and it’s opening them up for emotional blackmail,” she said on the Senate floor today.

And now Mississippi:

Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland, a Democrat, introduced a bill in the state’s lower chamber calling for the part of the Gulf of Mexico that borders his state to be renamed the “Gulf of America.” A local Latino GOP organization called on Holland to withdraw the measure. “If this bill passes the legislature and is signed into law, perhaps it is time to rename the Mississippi River,” wrote Bob Quasius, Café Con Leche’s president, in the letter. “After all, sharing a name with a state that wants to rewrite maps out of disdain for Mexicans would be a disgrace to the rest of the nation.”

…deep bench.

[Dr. O.P. Murthy is] accused of plagiarism when he printed a book on ‘crime scene investigation’ by allegedly lifting from various books.

However, ironically, Dr [R.C.] Deka, who has been asked to take action against Dr Murthy by the [Medical Council of India], was himself at the centre of a plagiarism controversy.

The University of Minnesota newspaper’s editorial board isn’t happy about huge sums of money going to a bogus administrative position for a retired football coach.

But I’m sure thousands of other UM students are honored to be burdened with debt and a cut-rate education for the sake of football.

In the middle of my Don DeLillo seminar this morning, a ceiling light flashed and a very loud alarm sounded.

And sounded and sounded.

“Guess we’d better get out of here,” I said to my students as a colleague popped his head into the room. “Should we get out?” he asked. Yes, said UD. Time to get out.

As we tromped downstairs from the fourth floor, we were joined by ever-swelling masses of humanity.

Everyone was thinking the same thing: It’s effing cold out there.

UD had been discussing the many senses of “plot” in Libra, and she just kept doing that — as they tromped the stairs, as her group gathered around her outside the building, and as they were told to get away from the building! by a security person. Talk, talk, talk. UD never stopped. “At $50,000 a year tuition,” she explained to her class, “I think you deserve seamless instruction.”

She’d brought her little brown leather notebook out with her. She checked her list of recurrent themes in the four novels we’ve so far read and talked and talked and talked. The class talked too.

They let us back in after fifteen minutes and we all enjoyed the feeling of warming up as we reentered the fourth floor classroom. Once everyone got settled, UD started up talking again.

[V]ideo [has] surfaced of Indian ministers watching what appeared to be video of a sex act on a cell phone during a debate in the house assembly.

Two Karnataka State Ministers C.C. Patil and Laxman Savadi are being accused of watching porn when they were supposed to be doing the people’s work.

A third minister who resigned allegedly owned the cell phone with the lewd images on it.

… bask in it.

It’ll work as well as this chick’s Prozac defense worked.

The Romney/Cantor argument about income inequality sweeps the nation.

Charming post by UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott on the burgeoning culture of ghosting (which has a tendency to shade into plagiarism) in the American university bureaucracy.

The trend is getting pretty embarrassing. On more than one occasion, UD has felt that various officials of her own university would lend more dignity to important events if they read their speeches beforehand, so that we didn’t have to watch them struggle through new words and phrases.

But there’s something Carl overlooks in his review of ghosted speeches and columns by university administrators and faculty, and that’s credit. If Carl had agreed (he’s notoriously burdened by conscience) “to lend my name to an article which the public relations office would ghostwrite, but which would be published under my byline,” he’d have been able to list this publication, and many others (he was asked to underwrite a series) in his annual report to the dean, on his cv, etc. Med school professors do this all the time – they take credit for research articles written by other people in and around their labs. Which is why high-profile faculty members of this sort will list, I don’t know, 7,000 publications on their cvs. An entire industry of ghosted books, ghosted articles, and ghosted speeches written by pharma-paid copywriters, public relations people, and grad students, churns away for these people.

A former Temple University student killed himself the other day, shot himself in the head, in the busiest part of campus. Plenty of students saw it happen, or saw the immediate aftermath.

UD readers might remember Mitchell Heisman, who shot himself in the head in the middle of Harvard Yard a few years ago, on a busy morning. Or Nora Miller, who, on another busy morning, immolated herself on the Wesleyan University running field where she (a track star) practiced.

Most suicides are private; UD remembers a GW woman going across the river to a hotel room in Virginia to kill herself. The main character in Doris Lessing’s famous story, “To Room Nineteen,” similarly chooses an anonymous hotel room for her death. Many suicides are committed in hotel rooms.

Public suicides literally want to make a spectacle of themselves. It seems important to their conception of their deaths that they be seen, that people be riveted to and disturbed by their charred or bloodied bodies in the public square. Heisman distributed, just before his death, a long manuscript about the meaninglessness of life. His public gesture seems to have been the endpoint of an elaborate argument to which we were meant to pay attention.

Private suicides seem a reckoning with private demons; public suicides often feel like an angry message.

I met this guy, Antonio Tapies, in the Spanish Pyrenees, when I was, what, fifteen? My parents had arranged a summer for me in Barcelona, the Pyrenees, and Ibiza, with the family of a Catalan colleague of his. The family lived in all three places.

These people had been very close to Joan Miro, and on a wall near their Barcelona apartment’s dining room table was one of his canvases, squiggly black objects against a lot of emptiness.

Tapies came for an evening visit to their Pyrenees farm (their acres of strawberries were gathered by villagers and then put into pies for us). I remember thinking it odd or pretentious or whatever that he wore sunglasses all evening, sitting on the dark patio and talking softly. I remember being told by the family what an honor it was to meet this eminent man, but his name meant nothing to me.

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And as long as I’m writing about Artists I Have Known:

An exhibition [at the National Museum in Krakow] of the works of Wojciech Fangor is bound to strike a chord with a multitude of devotees. Set to run from 12.10.2012 to 6.01 2013 in the Main Building, the concept of the show is tightly linked to the artist’s biography. 2012 sees Fangor’s 90th birthday. The first of his pieces to command attention in studies of his work was created at the easel whilst he was a pupil of Tadeusz Pruszkowski. He was fifteen years old at the time and the exhibition will thus also celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the working life of one of Poland’s most significant 20th century artists.

UD knew Fangor when he lived next door to her little upstate New York house. His house was big, with a big studio in which hung big unfinished canvases. A substantial man with a booming voice and enormous hands, he spent a lot of time, those summers (we only go there in the summer; he and his wife lived there all year), chopping wood for the winter. He loved his many cats, all of them strays. He built himself an observatory, in which we’d gather to gaze at the amazing sky. In the evenings, he and Magda curled up on their big country bed and laughed at American television shows.

I’ve been pretty bed-bound — recovering from bronchitis. My bed faces a wall of windows overlooking open forest, and it’s a real bird theater out there. All day long, robins, wrens, blue jays, mourning doves, and crows fly through. The mourning doves pick among the dry leaves on the forest floor.

Both yesterday and today, I’ve seen a falcon! The female American kestrel.