… Libra, is “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”

But Joyce is more likely to have written the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM’s predecessor, four, has a thousand pages, and we may be sure that five will have many more than that. It’s a megaton psychotropic prescription machine. As Allen Frances, editor of earlier, more sane, DSMs, writes, “DSM-5 is suggesting many new and untested diagnoses and also markedly reduced thresholds for old ones.”

Frances offers an example:

‘Attenuated psychosis syndrome’ will have a ridiculously high false positive rate ( 80-90%), no effective treatment, would promote unnecessary exposure to harmful antipsychotics, and would cause needless worry and stigma. Since studies prove conclusively that the symptoms are so very rarely predictive of psychosis, why in the world would DSM-5 give someone the stigmatizing and absurdly misleading label ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ and open the door to inappropriate antipsychotic use? Recognizing all these risks, a large portion of schizophrenia and prodromal researchers are sensibly opposed to the inclusion of ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ in DSM-5. But unaccountably, the work group stubbornly clings to its proposal and, without the petition, there is a good chance it may sneak into DSM-5.

In great part, the DSM-5 is a work of the imagination. Like all ambitious novels, it exhibits enormous scope and imaginative energy. Told from the point of view of a detached omniscient narrator, it chronicles the plummeting of populations into pre-psychosis, and their ultimate rescue by “the number one revenue producer of all classes of drugs,” anti-psychotics. Its pages evoke a les misérables America, massively prodromal, holding out its butyrophenone-bowl on every street corner.

The On-Line College Crapshoot

But read the article for details.

For reasons both logical and illogical, [Penn State’s] coach has long been obsessed about sheltering his Nittany Lions team, as if it were a wartime army.

Practices are closed to the media. Assistant coaches are off-limits. Reporters have virtually no access to players. Information – think of [Joe] Paterno’s long-secret salary – is locked away.

A decade ago, for example, when The Inquirer did a lengthy series on the growing influence of money in college sports, Penn State jealously guarded information – such as the dollar amount of its contract with Nike – that other schools, schools with less-upright reputations, readily made available.

Now, unsettling as the implications might be for Penn State’s loyal followers, outsiders will want to know what else has been hidden from public view over the years.

There will be speculation that perhaps the reason Paterno’s program never ran afoul of the NCAA was because the NCAA couldn’t cross the moat. What else went on …?

To live in a university-sports village, to be one of its faithful flock, is to realize that what Coach does is best for you and best for the team, and not ever to question Coach. Coach leads the wartime army. It’s always wartime. In wartime ways of life that seem strange in times of peace become routine. Loose lips sink ships!

The University of Oregon – one of the scummier sports schools around – is having a bit of trouble holding aloft the ‘self-supporting’ banner. We don’t take a penny! Our program makes so much money we don’t need to take a penny!

Well, if you’re persistent enough, and don’t mind filing repeated public-records requests, you’ll discover in the fine print at almost every school that claims to be self-supporting all sorts of contractual maneuvers that amount to subsidies.

For instance, UD‘s friend

Bill Harbaugh, an economics professor … filed a public-records request. What turned up was an illuminating “memorandum of understanding” between Pat Kilkenny, former athletic director, and former UO president Dave Frohnmayer that was signed in June 2009, two weeks before Frohnmayer retired.

That memo capped the athletic department’s overhead assessment at 3 percent through June 2012. That is one half the assessment rate charged other UO auxiliaries this year …

For instance:

UO diverted $8.5 million in general fund dollars from 2002-2010 to pay for academic support — including tutoring and counseling — of its athletes.

For instance:

[T]he general fund is picking up 50 percent of the legal costs in defending UO against possible recruiting violations by the football program.

A clean program (UD hasn’t encountered one yet, but assume a clean program) of this sort costs a fortune; a dirty one, like Oregon’s (And pretty much all the others. You know Jerry Tarkanian’s famous saying: “In major college basketball, nine out of 10 teams break the rules. The other one is in last place.”), costs a mega-fortune because of all the court cases and settlements and lawyers. Basically big-time university sports programs are always under threat of sanctions for violations, always being sued by fired coaches, always – see Penn State – defending themselves against criminal conduct accusations, always paying hotshot accountants to hide their bright budgeting ideas (as in the present case), etc., etc. Do you have any idea how much money self-supporting jock schools have to take out of their general funds just to protect their asses from what it means to do business as a big-time university sports team?

Who knows how much of it had to do with efforts to protect the reputation of a storied sports program?

Whatever the motives, Penn State’s athletic director and vice president for finance will turn themselves in to the authorities on Monday. Both are charged with perjury and failure to report in a sex scandal involving the football team’s former defensive coordinator.

For fifteen years, Jerry Sandusky was a “a sexual predator who used his position within the university and community to repeatedly prey on young boys.” The charge is that the other men knew about it but did nothing, and then lied about their knowledge of it to a grand jury. Did they protect Sandusky because he was “closely identified with the school’s reputation as a defensive powerhouse and a program that produced top-quality linebackers”?

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UD thanks David.

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UPDATE: “We all make little mistakes in our lives.”

Title of Sandusky’s autobiography: Touched.

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The legend of Penn State’s Sandusky
Is beginning to smell rather musky.
Their glorious coach
Is a bit of a roach.
Not to mention a bit of a putzsky.

UD‘s seen her share of bizarre defenses of big-time university sports, but this is her first encounter with the pancreatectomy argument.

Of course, you can remove the pancreas, and though the removal creates problems of its own, the procedure – partial or total – is sometimes indicated.

The pancreas argument – the university is a body with vital organs, and you can’t take out vital organs – comes from Steve Reznick, a University of North Carolina psychology professor and major Tar Heels fan.

Another faculty sports rep said – at a meeting with furious UNC faculty – something just as strange:

“There is a collegiate decor created by athletics that bind us all together in a way that doesn’t happen otherwise.”

Drink that one up, me hearties! A … decor … a decor that binds… A pancreas… a pancreas that sustains the life-giving operations of our … decor…

Rather than drawing their inspiration from interior design or internal organs, UD thinks faculty sports zealots would be more persuasive (the professors at the meeting with them left it even more unhappy) if they drew upon religious faith. UD recommends they start with this book:

Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South

There are beautiful liturgical paragraphs here that may be easily committed to memory when you are challenged to defend the foundational Being of basketball. The professors around you will certainly scoff at your enthusiasm; but this response will allow you to rebuke them as satanic and flounce out of the room.

… to go in to the University of Central Arkansas campus. Like the similar University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, UCA appears to be an almost wholly criminal enterprise (scroll down). The basic form of intellectual inquiry on both campuses is: How can I steal all the school’s money?

UCA keeps losing presidents due to their personal money management issues… And now it’s losing vice presidents. This one vp – who seems to have made international students work harder than they’re legally allowed (the story doesn’t describe the nature of the work – personal work for the vp?) – is harder to get rid of because he’s a professor. So what they’re doing is giving him no classes, firing him from the vice presidency, and keeping his salary (somewhat lowered) intact. Beautiful tenure tale, no? Behave very badly, and get $90,000 for doing nothing. Tenured professors, take note.

This guy

also accompanied now former UCA President Allen C. Meadors [latest presidential bad boy] on a trip to Mexico that included planned stops at two universities, but the second visit was canceled and the two spent two nights in the resort town of Cancun.

Meadors, in emails to university administrators, said the second stop was canceled because it would have been an additional seven- to eight-hour drive to the second university.

That makes sense. Wasn’t until the president and vice-president got to Mexico that they realized there are distances between cities.

Clearly we need to take all decision-making out of the hands of the current UCA administration. We need to figure out exactly what’s going on there. A fact-finding mission would be a good place to start. Might shake things up a bit.

**********************************

Mr UD said the story of the distant cities and the unforeseen issue of transport reminded him of something Mao once wrote:

Coal and iron cannot walk by themselves; they need vehicles to transport them. This I did not foresee.

Begin the day with UD by asking yourself: Why are several online courses of study at the University of Florida double the price of their equivalent on-campus programs? Mass Communications on campus, for instance, is around $14,000; online, $28,000.

Is it worth twice as much money for you never to see or speak to a professor or a classmate? To use up no resources of the university’s physical plant? To have a faceless overworked underqualified drudge as your air-traffic controller? Everyone knows cheater-ridden online university education stinks. Why in the world does the University of Florida make online students pay double for the privilege?

Very simple answer. Read this.

Because it can.

… I don’t buy the belief at [Louisiana State University] and elsewhere that athletics serve as the front porch of a university, drawing attention to the academic kitchen. It is a hopeful sentiment, but I don’t see any supporting evidence. In fact, the opposite seems to be true.

Football does not appear to provide an open window but rather a closed shade, reinforcing L.S.U.’s athletic standing while secluding its academic reputation, however inadvertently. In my travels, I cannot remember a single person outside of Louisiana knowing or mentioning that L.S.U. aspires to be as competitive in the classroom as on the football field.

… Philip Levine.

[W]hat scenario could you imagine that would [scandalously] end your … term [as laureate]?

I’m 83 years old. I don’t think there’s any intern with the patience to be seduced by me.

… I wonder if you agree with John Barr, the president of the Poetry Foundation, who, with the help of a $200 million endowment, has been trying to popularize poetry by encouraging poets to write more upbeat poems.

Hell, no. I can’t believe this guy Barr is a poet, because I don’t think a real poet would think in that way. When a poem comes to you, you’re not going to say, “Oh, no, this goddamned poem is just too mean-spirited.”

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Levine’s poetry?

UD is not a Philip Levine fan. He is chatty, drifty, message-bearing, without style. But – si t’insiste – here’s a Levine poem.

Gospel

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don’t
ask myself what I’m looking for.
I didn’t come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself,
although it greets me with last year’s
dead thistles and this year’s
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider’s cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I’ve never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. “Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.

************************************************

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed.

We start with some nature imagery. Begins optimistically, especially given the title, “Gospel.” Good news, the world is born again each morning, each day, each season, the new grass not growing but rising. Yet the use of overused, not descriptively acute words like loitering suggests that although the world described might be new, the poem is unlikely to be anything we haven’t sort of seen before. True, we’ve got some nice alliteration going – l sounds in the first two lines, d sounds in the three that follow – but there’s no sensibility here. Plain homespun description.

I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks.

A man walks in the woods, pondering as he goes. The calm, plainspoken feel here is very Robert Frosty. Also the sense of an affinity between the poet and the natural world: the grass rises, the poet goes higher. All this rising, plus the poem’s title, puts us in a spiritual mood.

I guess he wants the u assonance of lupine and strewn, but like loitering, strewn is a sort of obvious choice – we want the poet to go higher stylistically. You can be plainspoken and stylish at the same time (see Whitman).

I don’t
ask myself what I’m looking for.
I didn’t come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.

The fresh morning ground, still cold, still silent, calls the poet; he wants to pace a pristine earth. To clear his head? He’s not sure, and neither are we.

Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself,
although it greets me with last year’s
dead thistles and this year’s
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider’s cloth.

The earth is beautiful and new, but gives no answers; we can pace it season after season and it will remain spiritually unforthcoming. It seems friendly enough though, setting out for us its rich mix of live and dead growth… The phrases here –

dead thistles and this year’s / hard spines, early blooming / wild onions, the curling remains / of spider’s cloth

– are very nice indeed, and begin to give things a little symbolic traction having to do with the ceaseless mysterious round of death and life and death and life. In terms of sound, early and curling work beautifully and subtly together… I mean, the subtlety throughout these lines involves a kind of menacing morbidness (dead, hard spines, remains) alongside a perky evocation of new life. So life and death mixed (the poet is surrounded by the dead remains of the last season and bursting-forth shoots of the new), and maybe there’s a lesson somewhere in here for the poet.

What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I’ve never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about.

Something has very much upset the poet; he has, on reading it, crushed the bad-news-bearing letter and (rather than throwing it away) stuck it in his back pocket. This letter is what he has brought to the nature dancing and dying all around him. He doesn’t tell us what the deal is, but the main thing is that it’s very bad news, and the poet is powerless by way of responding to it.

So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light.

In response to whatever anguish this letter has prompted, the poet walks the mountains – maybe to calm himself, maybe – despite the silence of nature – to find some answers. Don’t forget the poem’s title, obviously at odds with the idea that nature is silent. The gospel proclaims not only the truth but the gospel truth of our redemption, our eventual transcendence of earthly anguish and confusion. Meanwhile, the poet is so upset that he’s not even fully seeing the world – half sightless, he keeps walking; and now the wind comes up, and that sound will carry the meaning of the poem. The calming effect of the wind, we take it, calms the poet’s tormented thoughts, calms his darkness as the day breaks, so that he can return to the world of people able to bear his bad news.

“Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.

That’s pronounced sao-ing – a word for the soft sound of the wind the poet’s been hearing. The poet is maybe initially pleased, as a writer would be, to find this elegant word, with its deep (heavy) roots in Old English; yet the poem ends with the sad observation that, far from gospel weight, our words, under the impact of insoluble human burdens, bear nothing at all – they’re merely sounds, as the wind is merely a sound.

In short, the poem records an agonized poet turning to those two hardies – nature and art – for consolation and clarity. To no one’s surprise, both fail, and having read the poem it’s clear the title is ironic. Bitter. Our gospel is writ in water, writ on the wind, on violently crushed letters, etc.

I have the same problem with this working out of a familiar human circumstance and dilemma that I have with much of Robert Frost, who seems to be walking a few paces behind this pacing poet. Or in front of. This poem’s tag line is disappointing, since it’s too easy, as if the poet felt compelled to formalize his experience, round it out, stick on a moral, rather than conclude the poem with the full measure of anger and inconclusiveness the speaker no doubt feels.

Levine calls John Berryman his biggest influence. Berryman would have done something other than end with the limp-wristed How weightless business.

“I was one of the first to teach a fully online course during the mid 1990s facilitated by Real Education later renamed eCollege. Despite claims, the lack of face to face interaction significantly diminishes the quality of many courses,” writes a professor of finance.

List, list, o, list!

We have witnessed the skyrocketing of impersonation fraud on SATs, ACTs and even graduate admission and licensure exams all with strong security measures that are nonexistent for online courses. Though surveys report cheating rates similar to in-class students, research shows online students view many actions acceptable that are not for in-class peers.

… [E]mployers may question the motivation of an online student living a reasonable distance from a campus of similar or even superior quality. An education is more than text on a computer but the seasoning surrounding the classroom environment that enhances interpersonal and communication skills and provides a network of diverse friends.

… Many for profit and even public universities use subcontractors with limited credentials who simultaneously teach for a number of institutions on a per class basis.

Online: The sub-basement of higher education.

… Kurt Branham Barton, founder of Triton Financial in Austin, was convicted on 39 counts after his August trial, including more than a dozen each of wire fraud and money laundering. The charges could carry up to life in prison.

Prosecutors said Barton …used money that investors thought was for real estate deals and short-term business loans to pay for a luxury box at University of Texas football games…

Eh, plagiarism stories are a dime a dozen. UD bothers with this one – about a high-ranking Czech politician’s master’s thesis – only because what he did is even more lame/brazen than usual.

“The thesis has no footnotes… Also, there is a very limited bibliography from which the author allegedly drew …,” [an academic reviewer said]. “Of course, he only really drew from … two works … — … word for word.”

(What with everyone filming everyone these days and putting it on YouTube, UD thinks it would be kind of cool to watch one of these theses in process. Mlejnský (or whoever he’s paying to do the job) sits at a desk, opens the standard history of Charles University, scans its chapters, prints them out… Okay, not visually exciting at all. But haven’t you ever wondered how people look and what they say as they plagiarize? Is Mlejnský laughing that ah-hahahaha! scoundrel laugh as he bears down on each bundle with a big stapler?)

Our man Mlejnský points out, reasonably enough, that “My thesis advisor, who helped me prepare the work, said it was acceptable or good.” Magister M. got his MA here, and UD‘s been trying to figure out which of its MA-granting moving parts Mlejnský mlastered. She thinks it has to be Andragogy.

[A] Louisiana State University assistant professor identified a new species of pancake batfish in the Gulf of Mexico last year, and the discovery was recognized by the International Institute for Species Exploration as being one of 2010’s top 10 new species. While LSU didn’t increase his $85,000 pay, he did get a nice note of congratulations from the provost, he said.

Across the Baton Rouge campus, Les Miles is having a good year, too. His top-ranked LSU football team is undefeated… Miles will make an extra $200,000 on top of his $3.75 million-a-year salary if they win the title, and $300,000 more for winning the national crown.

… “We are not doing this, [said the professor,] for monetary gain.”

… “These coaches aren’t motivated by the bonuses,” said Scott Minto, director of the San Diego State University Sports MBA program. “It is about creating a legacy. National titles do that.”

Alabama Athletic Director Mal Moore said neither [Nick] Saban [$4.7 million annual salary with the chance of an additional $525,000] nor other coaches are in the business for the money.

Nobody’s in it for the money!

UD‘s friend Tammy took
these pictures at the
boardwalk dog parade.