Based on a common sensitivity to women’s issues.

A very cool idea from a couple of Yale law professors: Along with being totally candid with applicants about LSAT scores, grades, passing the bar, getting a job in a terrible legal market, and of course your school’s prestige or lack of same, and the effect of this on employment prospects, all law schools should “offer to pay off part of their first-years’ loans should these students realize that their prospects of successful legal careers are slim.”

Disapproving Yale professors fret about how the school would afford this idea. Yale’s endowment sputters along at around twenty billion – a big fat nothing compared to Harvard’s almost forty billion. They also think it would encourage students to drop out. They also fear it would lower their salaries.

None of the other professors says this last thing, of course. About salaries. But people who are still pulling down $300,000 or so in the worst market for their students in years have got to be keeping an anxious eye on the bottom line.

… has had a long, storied, lucrative relationship with the Johnson and Johnson corporation, makers of Risperdal, an absolutely adorable anti-psychotic for the millions of American children who, thanks largely to Biederman’s research, have been diagnosed bipolar.

What’s adorable about Risperdal is how it’s marketed. What child can resist free legos? Risperdal puts legos stamped with the word RISPERDAL in pediatricians offices! If the sight of a three-year old playing with toys advertising her induction into a world of really powerful anti-psychotic medicine doesn’t make you go AWWWW, maybe there’s something wrong with you.

Biederman’s Harvard-legitimized work for J&J no doubt made it easier for that company to get states like Texas to approve it for Medicaid coverage. Only now the state’s all pissed and it’s suing to beat the band because “The state contends it paid 45 times more for Risperdal than comparable drugs after accepting the company’s claims that it was superior to rival medications.” (Let’s not even talk about J&J ad reps kissing doctors’ asses to get them to prescribe it in unapproved ways.) On what research (assuming the state of Texas is able – and willing – to read research) did Texas base its conclusion that its citizens should subsidize Risperdal?

So – bottom line here is that J&J will lose the case and will be made to pay an absolutely derisory sum in damages – a few hundred million, the cost of doing business, no one gives a shit.

… in victory.

… of all things, has, on this day of Wikipedia blackout and Google protest over SOPA, just gotten back from a New Republic and GW Law School-sponsored gathering next door to her office on politics and the internet. Machers from the FTC, the FCC, and the State Department chatted about, as the State guy said, “the implications of connectedness.” Basic idea seems to be that the gov is eager to get every last one of us connected, and to make the country rich via internet-related business activity. But there are security and intellectual property problems aplenty.

Everyone on stage was male, slender, well-suited, and articulate. Also oddly superannuated. Numerically they’re forty or fifty, but decades of precocity seem to have placed them in their late sixties. They have already become wise.

People at UD‘s table (all of us munching scones and downing tea) were surprised and amused to find that she’s an English professor. Everyone else was a journalist or a law professor. UD told them she figured she was invited because of la blogue.

… is the latest school compelled to press the TRUSTEE DELETE button. Anthony Chiasson, arrested for insider trading, has been dropped from Babson’s board of trustees.

The beautiful synergy between hedge fund guys and BOTs (school gets money, hedgie gets respectability) has been all screwed up by the SEC, and any university that’s gone the hedgie trustee route bigtime (I’m looking at you, Brown) should probably be engaged in… call it proactive winnowing.

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Steve Cohen is a Brown trustee.

So I went to the university bookstore today to buy a couple of books for my classes. Of course I should get them at no cost, but I tend to forget to fill out the get-them-at-no-cost form, and then the first day of class is upon me and I must hie to the GW bookstore.

The morning had been bleak and wet, and I couldn’t help noting the contrast between a high desert (UD has just returned from a week in Sedona) and a low swamp. But by the time I got my ass in gear for the short walk to the store, the sky had gone all powder blue, and it looked as though DC had decided to try to win me back.

As always, I kept having La Kid sightings – kept thinking (wrongly) I was seeing my daughter (she’s a GW student) walking just ahead of me, or striding toward me, blond hair bouncing, expensive scarf whipping in the wind, black leggings and silver Wellies working it. I’ve tried, on this blog, to convey just how incredibly good GW women look – how chic, how burnished, how preternaturally put together. La Kid is one of these.

The snaky line at the bookstore moved fast. Students exchanged winter break stories (“I spent Christmas on a scummy beach in Louisiana. But it was a beach.”) and agreed that they weren’t ready for the new semester. They texted and texted and texted. One woman told another the entire plot of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Although UD has been suffering from a bit of post-travel fatigue, she found that her teaching, later in the day, perked her up nicely.

… Bless Your Business” is the title of the only text in a proposed course at Iowa State.

Faculty seem to have shot it down. Maybe if the professor had required more reading. There are certainly other books out there.

GOP HOPEFULS ON HOT SEAT
FOR KNOWING OTHER LANGUAGES

Many thoughtful people consider Scotland’s William Topaz McGonagall the worst poet in the history of the English-speaking world. His best-known poem, The Tay Bridge Disaster (here it is in full), has achieved renown, and remains constantly read and quoted.

Readers are especially drawn to its last stanza (the 1879 poem commemorates the deaths of passengers on a train that fell into the Tay River when the bridge over it collapsed):

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Writing like this never gets old, and very much lends itself to recitation. So on January 25, in a sign of McGonagall’s yet greater reach, pubs all over Scotland will celebrate not Robert Burns (January 25 is in fact Burns Night, when everyone’s supposed to be celebrating him), but McGonagall.

The most destructive brain drain is of the young. Since 2008, ever more young people (mostly in their 20s) have gone, often to foreign universities. “When I left to study abroad in 2006 I was the odd man out,” says a young Greek lawyer. “Now I thank my lucky stars.” Greece’s archaic education system and strikes have held back those who pursued their education at home. Exams have been delayed or cancelled. Some students are a year or more behind in their studies.

Now they’re even worse.

Clearly using the Italian university system as their model, professors at Kosovo’s Pristina University have discovered that a professorship represents a nice stable income base from which you can launch a political (or other) career.

The real beauty is that you don’t even have to show up at the university. You can just take the money and the prestige and the title and run with them.

Israel’s haredim.

Kent State athletics must be majorly pissed with the student journalist who discovered that a guy about to donate a million dollars to the program stole from his investors. Of course KSU already knew the guy was a scam artist, but didn’t care, since money is money and fuck the university’s reputation. KSU’s athletic director explained to the student reporter that the donor’s run-in with the SEC “was 12 years ago, and it was fully litigated and he abided by the letter of the litigation.” If, after paying his multimillion dollar penalty, this guy still had enough investor money left over to assist KSU in its basketball ambitions, what the hell? Where’s the problem?

Well, turns out the guy rescinded the gift. The guy got offended.

Poor KSU! All ready, arms outstretched, to take the leftover fraud bucks, and here comes this student journalist digging up ancient history and offending the donor! Maybe they can approach Bernie Madoff.

I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights – her chronicle of her daughter’s death and her own aging – on this flight from Phoenix to Baltimore. It’s kept me occupied. We land in fifteen minutes.

I like Didion’s mournful chant, her brief, much-repeated litanies. She plays the “blue night” idea (we want to think of our lives as long summer nights that never darken) beautifully through the text. Her constant rounding back to painful motifs and memories cuts a deeper and deeper circle of implication, the prose grinding down until we’re surrounded by very dark canyon walls.

It’s poetic prose, stating and restating its symbols, making them a dirge. She’s troubled, in the text, by her technique of indirection, but she needn’t be. Solemn poetic dance is the best way to get at this stuff – in particular, the ridiculous tendency to believe in the permanence of life and health and happiness, “this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, and death.”

Returning, as I am now, from seven blissful days in Sedona, Arizona, I could almost assume this ridiculous tendency myself. The sweet spot: Didion’s eye travels over that long moment when her life achieved the sweet spot: Love, vocation, money, friends, glamor, fame, seaside Malibu in bloom… It’s rare for anyone that things turn out that well, and that they turn out that well for any length of time. Didion had this; and inevitably her book dwells on that delight, wonders if the recollection of the delight can sustain her.

She doesn’t think it can.

UD will cop to sharing with her a failure, so far, to confront certain certainties. She does, though, Didion-style, circle around them a lot.

The darkening to black of the blue night. It’s happening just outside UD‘s window right now. Maybe it’s not so much about not confronting it as not knowing how to play it (play it as it lays) – this bizarre concurrence of sweet and dark.

I know what I do. What I do is – like Didion – keep moving, keep feeling gratitude and love and excitement. The red rocks shine in the short blue night and I passionately respond.

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The sun cannot change, writes James Merrill to his just-born nephew in Little Fanfare for Felix Magowan:

It’s earth, it’s time,
Whose child you now are, quietly
Blotting him out. In the blue stare you raise
To your mother and father already the miniature,
Merciful and lifelong eclipse,
Felix, has taken place;
The black pupil rimmed with rays
Contracted to its task –
That of revealing by obscuring
The sunlike friend behind it.
Unseen by you, may he shine back always
From what you see, from others.