A study does side by side comparisons of the University of Singapore and the University of Malaysia, “two institutions that both began as offshoots of the same British colonial university.”

Lack of academic and administrative freedom, plus non-meritocratic admissions, guarantee substandard schools.

Yesterday, Les UDs hiked the towpath at the C & O Canal Park in Maryland. UD has visited these rocks and waterfalls all her life, first following the flat canal past mules pulling tourist boats, and then hanging over bridges above the rapids.

One winter Sunday in 1969, she walked the half-muddy, half-frozen towpath with her boyfriend, David Kosofsky. The day after that walk, she wrote a poem about it (the poem appeared in the Walter Johnson High School literary magazine, The Spectator). The first lines of the poem are this post’s title.

With David’s recent death in mind, UD yesterday recalled that day at the canal forty-two years ago. Her poem described David crashing a good-sized rock onto the canal’s surface, and the rock barely denting the ice. This seems to have struck wee UD as a metaphor for the way lovers try to break through the resistant enigma of each other … Maybe lovers even believe they have pierced the ice and gotten to the deep heart’s core , through the labyrinth of another’s being… More likely, love represents an unstoppable, every-day-briskly-setting-out, venture into the labyrinth… The thrown boulder, UD wrote in her teenage poem, barely nicks the surface. / Yet we never quite admit defeat. / Is this love?

Throughout our lives, David’s and mine, this idea of the mystery of other people expanded to embrace the mystery of one’s own self, and then the mystery of a larger world of humanity, nature, the divine. Here’s an excerpt from an October 2008 Gchat between UD and David. In it, he mentions his sister, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

UD: i’ve always been able to – it feels like really enter into the personality of certain other people
i guess that’s often a novelist’s – or a deep reader’s – trait
leaving yourself
entering other people
or some plausible version of other people
like… norman bates becoming his mother!!

David: and manage to experience other people from the inside?

UD: that’s how it feels
obviously one can’t know to what extent one’s getting anything right
but that’s how it feels – really climbing into their skin

David: have you ever read Dilthey? His idea of `verstehen’? It’s about that… only as applied to history or sociology.

UD: yes – verstehen is in fact an interesting way of approaching what i’m trying to get at
understanding deeply
selflessly
only sometimes i think it’s a little crazy

David: Eve and I, when we were younger, used to talk about what you were just talking about… that kind of understanding of another person… whether it was possible… and if so whether desirable.. and if so whether (as Eve always insisted) FRIGHTENING.

But in Iris Murdoch’s unfrightening sense, this entering into the truths of another person was the basis of virtue:

[M]ost great writers have a sort of calm merciful vision because they can see how different people are and why they are different. Tolerance is connected with being able to imagine centers of reality which are remote from oneself. The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world in his own image. I think this kind of merciful objectivity is virtue…

Key to mercy is this retained sense of the shadowiness of other human beings. Robert Penn Warren begins a poem to his child this way:

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.

He wants to speak to his child directly, unload his wisdom and his love… And yet nothing direct can be said. The poem is a series of beautiful indirections, failures to say anything forthrightly.

And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head
Of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving,
But without sound. The lips,
They were trying to say something very important.

In that same chat, David put the matter in Buddhist terms.

David: within each person (I’m not stating this as an empirical fact or observation at all… it’s a `belief’ if you will) there is what I’ll call (since I guess I got…
… the idea from this tradition) a Buddha Nature. The trick of really understanding a person… in the sense of wanting to be compassionate… or of actually BEING compassionate towards them…
… is to find… to recognize their Buddha Nature.

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

Was anything less shadowy now, avoiding stretches of towpath mud with my husband?

No. The clarity I’d gained was about the compassion drawn forth from obscurity.

In an excellent article, Takis Pappas talks about the failed state of Greece.

Longtime readers know that, since the founding of this blog, UD has singled out the Greek university system as the very worst in Europe. Current events in Greece clarify the larger context of this scandal.

Fifty thousand! FEEEEFFFTEEEEE TAOZAND!

Do you know how much money Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs earns every, I dunno, minute? His mere bonuses in the last few years have ranged between fifty and one hundred million dollars.

FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS?  Him AND the Missus?

Lawdy. Maybe he figures putting Barnard’s president on the Goldman Sachs board is like giving the school a lot of good stuff, but Debora Spar should probably talk to Ruth Simmons about that one. (Upside: It pays you insanely well for doing almost nothing. Downside. Simmons has announced her resignation from Brown. She will be busy with Goldman litigation no doubt.)

Blankfein recently blanked on a speech he was supposed to give at Barnard. Word is he cancelled because of School the Squid Week, planned to coincide with his appearance. (It’s a reference to the vampire squid metaphor in Matt Taibbi’s famous Goldman Sachs article.) Plus there’s the Occupy Wall Street thing down the block.

It’s all getting a lot of press attention — as will Spar herself when students discover the sorts of colleges their president presides over.

But anyway. Predatory capitalism is certainly interesting, and worth studying, and Barnard students – plus their president – have front-row seats.

There’s nothing new or interesting about these two stories. A politician and a reporter plagiarize. As is true of all the plagiarists UD has covered on this blog over the years, the reporter is a serial plagiarist. As is true of most plagiarizing politicians she has covered on this blog, this latest one, Scott Brown, barely deigns to notice the event, calling it all “silly.” So what if his statement (on his website) of his personal values was actually Elizabeth Dole’s statement of her personal values?

Wendy Kaminer comments.

[G]hostwriting and plagiarism are not “nothing.” Speaking for yourself, you inevitably reveal yourself, intentionally or not; pretending to speak for yourself, while hiring others to speak for you, you remain in the shadows. Who are these people we send to Washington to run the country? Who knows?

Who are these reporters and opinion writers we read? Who writes the research papers clinicians depend upon in prescribing therapies and pills and devices?

Ghostwriters, guest writers, public relations people, lobbyists, interns, research assistants, lab assistants, graduate students – there’s an entire simulacrum industry now. It stands between us and the truth.

There’s a great photo of a (Goldman Sachs-controlled, for-profit) college admission director’s vanity plate here.

There’s a great email from an admissions director here. Oh, let’s quote it.

Why are we letting them off of the phone? Are we making them push us off 3 TIMES?? We have proven that we can close the students we talk to but we need to talk to more students!!!!

Testimony from a former admissions person is here. Oh, let’s quote that too.

“The scales are so tipped; these people have no way of possibly making a good decision. …It was like we were used car salesmen. We would basically psychologically manipulate people into doing this. My master’s was in clinical psychology, and it was like I was using my powers for evil.”

And of course:

According to a JP Morgan Chase analyst report in 2010, [Goldman’s] schools have among the highest tuition of publicly traded corporations in higher education. Tuition at EDMC’s Art Institutes schools can average about $50,000 for an associate’s degree and between $77,000 to nearly $100,000 for a bachelor’s degree.

It’s predatory capitalism, folks: John Boehner changed the laws:

John Boehner, then the chairman of the House education committee, helped to eliminate a key provision that had moderated the growth of exclusively online universities.

The so-called 50 percent rule, which required half of all students to be at a ground campus in order for a school to be eligible for federal aid, had been put in place to discourage dubious distance education programs that offered subpar learning. Boehner helped to nix the rule in a budget agreement that took effect in early 2006, allowing schools to expand enrollments — and revenues — without having to invest in additional ground campuses. A spokesman for Boehner did not respond to requests for comment.

At which point fools rushed in. And the wolves ate them. They’re still eating them.

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

Brown University’s president, Ruth Simmons, sat on the board of Goldman Sachs while it re-made for-profit online higher education.

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

UD thanks Roy.

… involves pseudo-educational groups, so UD will cover it.

The story is both complicated and just breaking, so give me a bit.

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

Jack Shafer has the best take on the thing so far.

[E]ven by the low standards of the industry, the Wall Street Journal Europe circ shenanigans seem pretty wild. According to the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal Europe had a circulation of 75,000 in 2010 of which 31,000 of which were sold at a steep discount for distribution to students, who “may or may not have read them.”

What’s the bigger scandal? That the WSJE had a pitiful circulation of 75,000 in 2010? Or that 41 percent of that circulation was ginned up in an arrangement that the Audit Bureau of Circulation deemed “legitimate”…?

“Market forces,” said Cleveland State Athletic Director John Parry, “have gotten away from the idea that a coach is an educator.”

… will take place today on WBUR.

Christopher Beha’s adventures at Click-Thru U will be featured.

You need a subscription to Harper’s magazine to read what I just linked to; but here is the same author reflecting on what he’s learned.

[I]n broad social terms good educational outcomes follow from equality and not the other way around… [Thus,] the current prominence of Phoenix and other for-profit schools paints an even sadder picture than Phoenix’s critics might have thought. A society that can’t increase its roll of college graduates without sending billions of dollars in grants and loans to proprietary schools has problems that will not be fixed by the classroom.

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

UD thanks Dirk for the heads-up.

The editorial board of the University of Maryland student newspaper knows irony when it sees it. A much-touted new building with a tech-heavy 500-student classroom will be called the Teaching and Learning Center.

How good can even the best available technologies be when used in such a massive room among 500 students? While electronic clickers seemed like a pretty viable solution at one point, most students disapprove of these devices and find them an outdated waste of money.

Officials understand the importance of small classes — especially ones that are specifically tailored to the learning objectives of students in them — and have proved their dedication to bringing these types of innovative courses to the university. This editorial board is then left puzzled by plans to construct large auditoriums …

Well, but small’s a matter of degree… The University of Arizona has a 1,200-person lecture hall. So maybe administrators at the University of Maryland think a 500-person lecture hall is small. It’s certainly smaller.

And what was that about clickers? I’m sorry, but UM students are jumping the gun on that one. We still have one or two academic years to go before that backlash. We’re well-launched on the PowerPoint backlash, and of course the backlash against laptops in class is in full swing… But type CLICKERS UNIVERSITY into Google News and eighty percent of what you get will still be faculty, tech staff, and administration peeing their pants with excitement over them.

Students? Yeah, students have been bitching about clickers from the word go. But we’re still in the students? huh? lalala i can’t hear you phase on clickers.

Your tax dollars at work.

… American lit class today.

She took a look at his Wikipedia page.

In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, where he was assigned to write a piece on a racehorse that had jumped a fence and attempted to run away. After staring at the blank piece of paper on his typewriter all morning, he typed, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” and left.

… a past winner, 1987’s Joseph Brodsky.

A Russian poet tossed out of Russia for being a poet as well as a Jew, he lived in the States for many years until his early death (heart attack; he was a prodigious chain smoker) at 55. He loved the English language, and used it beautifully, but wrote most of his poems in Russian — and then turned around and translated many of them into English. He’s famous not just for his great poems and essays, but for the sass he gave a Soviet judge (“Who decided you’re a poet?” “Nobody. Who put me in the ranks of mankind?”).

In a review of a memoir about Susan Sontag, the reviewer cites a Brodsky anecdote:

[Joseph] Brodsky could outdo [Susan] Sontag both in heedless self-absorption and European-style imperturbability – though of course Brodsky, a Russian, was hardly more European than his paramour [Sontag]. Late in the book, [its author] reflects on something he had said over dinner: “You know in the end, none of it matters, what happens to you in your life. Not suffering. Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.”

So we can start here, with Brodsky’s nihilism (“I was a normal Soviet boy,” [Brodsky once] said. “I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky’s] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad.”), which of course wasn’t nihilism, or wasn’t thoroughgoing every blessed day nihilism… He’d been through enough horror and absurdity in his life to feel the pointless degradation of being human — at least in the corporate sense (“I think the world is capable of only one thing basically — proliferating its evils.”). Yet he insisted in his Nobel address that

Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one’s task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one’s own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be regrettable to squander this one chance on someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience…

Personal salvation, if you will, was indeed possible, through the mutual misanthropy, the consciousness-equality, of aesthetic experience:

A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others – if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person’s conduct. [A] novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness – of a writer or a reader.

Take his poem, Seaward:

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

Seaward

Darling, you think it’s love, it’s just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles “Oh, stop it, Bernie,”
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn’t grow in size once he’s been portrayed.
Look: what’s been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon’s blade.

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

A man takes a train journey, with his lover, to the coast. He reprimands her for her romanticism. Nothing like traveling on a swaying train late at night, the windows dark, muffled voices from other compartments, the natural world blurred by the force of the train’s onward rush… Or so you think, love. Really, we’re just traveling from Point A to Point B. The lovers in the next compartment? They’re as ridiculous as we are when we go at it.

The world of the train is in fact cramped and pitifully reduced to basic human needs, a place of hooks for the bags of food we’re carrying, and little toothbrushes for our smoke-stained teeth. Hook to this, and brush to that — the setting is ridiculously like a military camp, full of machines that want to be of service but are “dwarfed” by a sense of futility.

Be happy, then, for the busy, legible, utilitarian world that will reveal itself outside all this, when the sun comes up. We prefer that richly elaborated world, because losing ourselves in it means losing our sense of pointlessness.

Only trapped inside of places like trains, where our essential reduction reveals itself, do we recognize the truth. Only negotiating the narrow bathroom recalls us to our degraded condition.

In other words: Want to see yourself? Look at your piss dwindling in the flushed toilet bowl.

Man shouldn’t grow in size once he’s been portrayed.
Look: what’s been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon’s blade.

Not really in a holiday mood, is he? She thought they’d steal away for a romantic weekend at the shore; he’s brooding over the stinky, sicko, Toy World we all agree to live in… Only thing to do is be honest about it. Let’s not give ourselves airs. We’re just as stupid and embarrassing in our pretensions to a higher passion as the people in the next compartment. The cramped toy world of wrenches and nails hasn’t been left behind when we go to the majestic shore. On the contrary, the horizon over the ocean is just another machine — a blade — which makes clear, with infinite precision, the chopped up, meager nature of the earth.

The technique here is the same as Auden’s (a major influence on Brodsky) and the same as Elizabeth Bishop’s:

What interests me is [Auden’s] symptomatic technique of description. He never gives you the real . . . ulcer . . . he talks about its symptoms, ya? He keeps his eye all the time on civilization, on the human condition. But he doesn’t give you the direct description of it, he gives you the oblique way. …[I]f you really want your poem to work, the usage of adjectives should be minimal; but you should stuff it as much as you can with nouns — even the verbs should suffer. If you cast over a poem a certain magic veil that removes adjectives and verbs, when you remove the veil the paper still should be dark with nouns.

Language, using language in a certain way, turns out to be, for Brodsky, the one reliable non-nihilism:

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave – as he thinks at that moment – a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form – the poem – most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. … The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience…

The train is a pathetic, jerry-built interior accelerating extraordinarily through an immense outer darkness. To this train the poet brings his train of thought, his wordkit. However dark the manifest content he derives from the meeting of mind and machine, consciousness and world, the poet will in fact be celebrating, scrunched up in his little compartment, his writing pad on his knees. For he has felt the ecstasy of comprehension. And that’s the ticket.

… on last night’s debate.

Huntsman I can understand and appreciate. Perry is an empty bad suit. Romney lies with such facility it unnerves me. Bachmann is a fanatic, as, although I am extremely fond of him, is Ron Paul. Santorum just seems like a lost child from the 1950s, trying to have the campaign he dreamed about when he was ten. Cain is an egomaniac businessman with a talk show host patter and a mild wit. Gingrich is a giant, gaseous asshole.

… from the Something Awful forums. Feel free to look around.