Shalala …was the president of Wisconsin when Barry Alvarez was football coach. She wanted to hire him as Miami’s coach at one point.

… Alvarez and his son lost $1 million in [Nevin] Shapiro’s Ponzi scheme. Here’s a couple of questions Shalala will get hit with whenever she surfaces:

1) Did your know your good friend, Alvarez, lost $1 million to Shapiro?

2) Why didn’t you inform [Miami’s new coach] of this issue when he took the job?

We just hired this guy, and now he’s won the IZA Prize in Labor Economics.

… law school graduates!

As long as there’s a Goldman Sachs, all is not lost.

Some will argue that eliminating amateurism for college football means the “bad guys win.” In fact, the opposite is true. Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game. Some will wonder what minor league football is doing on campus in the first place — I have wondered about that myself. Yet, the game has found an important entertainment role connected to academia, and the billion dollar television contracts prove it is a valuable commodity.

Huh?

You’d think a law professor might have a grasp of argumentation.

We should promote professional sports on college campuses because it’s entertaining? Broadcasting all student sexual activity on large screens throughout the campus would also be entertaining. Should we do it?

“Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game.” Yes, and that is why professional basketball and football in American are so pure and unpolluted. It doesn’t seem to occur to Roger Abrams that there are manifold other sources of pollution.

And …connected to academia? Big time sports as currently played on American campuses not only have no connection at all to academia; they’re actively destructive of it.

I mean, what does Abrams have in mind by academia? Classroom buildings adjacent to stadiums? The appearance on a television screen, during a football game, of the name of a university?

And billion dollar tv contracts prove it’s a valuable commodity? Ask Donna Shalala, or any number of university presidents up to their asses in legal bills and bad publicity, how valuable a commodity it is. It’s precisely the outrageously big money that’s brought in all the scum and made university football and basketball lucrative but deadly to academia.

That is, again, if by academia you mean something other than buildings where administrators collect ticket and luxury suite and television proceeds. If on the other hand you’re okay with the Auburnization of our universities – if money and entertainment seem to you overriding ‘academia’ goals – if you think universities are money and entertainment centers above all (they will certainly become so under this regime, since no other activity on any campus can hope to compete with an immense high-profile billion dollar industry), then go with it. Go with it.

…in Libya. Here’s Al Jazeera live.

… way.

Gerson M. Sternstein, MD – Dr. Sternstein is the co-owner and Medical Director of Paragon Behavioral Health. He received his undergraduate degree, medical school training, and psychiatric residency education at Yale University.

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State regulators have accused Berlin psychiatrist Gerson Sternstein with grossly overprescribing narcotics to drug-addicted patients at his office, a pattern that they say fed the patients’ drug abuse and led in some cases to criminal behavior — the reselling of drugs on the street.

Two patients under Sternstein’s care died of drug overdoses. In wrongful-death lawsuits that are separate from the state action, the families of the two dead patients contend that Sternstein was essentially a drug dealer …

Hartford Courant

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!!!

What were his peers on when they did the ratings?

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Unbelievable levels of drug distribution alleged from one man. As always, given the national pain pill crisis, the question is why it took so long for anyone to do anything about this.

One of the daffier experimental ideas in the Australian mental health community – trying out anti-psychotic drugs on children as young as fifteen who have never had a psychotic episode but might, by some mysterious standard, be at risk for one in the future – has been shot down due to international outrage.

Whether it’s Joseph Biederman here or Patrick McGorry there, note the common thread: dosing young and vulnerable brains and bodies with immensely powerful drugs, based on the thinnest of diagnostic justifications. It’s a sickening, destructive, and frightening trend. Universities need to be aware that they are housing – and often celebrating – the dosers.

People like [University of Miami president Donna] Shalala ... are the system. They have cross-contaminated school standing with NCAA hypocrisy. They are one and the same. Shalala maintains a watchdog role in the NCAA.

… Was this decades-long culture of institutional malfeasance [at the University of Miami] so rooted it ignored [warnings about Nevin Shapiro]? Was the lack of institutional control at the very heart of the institution?

“[A]s one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, … moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night,” writes James Wood, in a New Yorker review of a book about secularism.

Like André Comte-Sponville, who, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, celebrates as ‘atheist spirituality’ the experience of Rilkean moments of self-dissolution which allow one to feel the true being of the world and one’s natural place in it, the contributors to The Joy of Secularism (its cover archly done up to resemble The Joy of Cooking) argue that secularism is “not a negative condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”

One of Joy‘s contributors, Bruce Robbins, extends Comte-Sponville’s ecstatic immanence, his worship of the earth and of humanity’s habitation upon it, beyond the mystically experiential, arguing that religious fullness – of meaning and value – may be derived from social action. Wood writes:

[Robbins] faults Charles Taylor for assuming that modern secular life “is beset with the malaise of meaninglessness.” Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means “the elimination of magic,” but it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic. If a malaise besets contemporary life, Robbins writes, it may have been produced not by the march of progress but by the faltering of progress — “by the present’s failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”

Here, Robbins, like many secularists, aligns himself with Camus’ existential defiance of meaninglessness through the free, creative, ascription of meaning to a Sisyphean world – a meaning which, founded on the human, and on the love of the human, would inevitably have social justice at its core.

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But Wood points out that all the secular – indeed, all the religious – affirmation and comfort in the world can’t really stop us asking our “tormented metaphysical questions.” (Why is life so short? So inexplicable?) As Adam Phillips, a contributor to the Joys volume, says elsewhere:

There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail… [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.

Indeed we prove recalcitrant even to the foundational project of spiritual calming, or at least spiritual clarity; we continue to harbor hatred of, and rage at, our stingy, undisclosing world. Wood quotes a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:

For one moment she felt that if [she and her companion] both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.

Beautiful, joyous, vigorous, wise Mrs. Ramsay must be summoned from the dead to share her wisdom about life, and to tell us why she, so vigorous and good, had to die; yet she stays as silent as the friend Donald Justice addresses in his poem, Invitation to a Ghost:

Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.

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“The main condition of absurdity,” writes Thomas Nagel in a 1971 essay, The Absurd, “is the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.” He anticipates the problem with Comte-Sponville’s atheist spirituality: we simply seem constituted toward transcendence, toward the positing and sensing of so much more than this. We try to allow ourselves to be dragooned (a gloriously absurd word, that) back into the limited enterprise of a human life, but we remain unconvinced; as soon as we get there, a collision occurs “between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.” When we’re truly earthbound, our curious but rather impressive “capacity to see ourselves without presuppositions, as arbitrary, idiosyncratic, highly specific occupants of the world, one of countless possible forms of life” is activated.

Hence our absurd predicament: We may have trouble believing in heaven, but we are, most of us, entirely unable to believe exclusively in earth. For us, things seem always to ramify, things are fraught, things are always spiraling outward with transcendent implication. Caught on an earth which ever catches us up, we’re in a predicament, writes Nagel, both “sobering and comic.”

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If there’s not much disentangling absurdity discursively, there’s its aesthetic treatment (hence Wood’s recourse to Woolf), in which this dilemma is staged in ways that elucidate it and reconcile us to it.

In his preface to a selection of Philip Larkin’s poems, Martin Amis attempts to account for Larkin’s status as the best-loved of post World War II British poets. It’s odd that he’s so loved, given his sour – even ugly – personality, and what Amis rightly calls the “militant anti-romanticism” of the poems.

Seamus Heaney’s misgivings are probably representative: Larkin is “daunted” by both life and death; he is “anti-poetic” in spirit; he “demoralises the affirmative impulse.”

Yet of course Larkin, more powerfully than any other poet of his time, places himself precisely in the thick of absurdity; he is the emblematic sober and comic stick in the mud.

His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them – was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined. Larkin, often, is more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable.

We absorb him like that because he captures our recalcitrance to our projects, and even makes this recalcitrance sing. We recognize ourselves in Larkin’s resigned irony because so often that is exactly where we are. Larkin doesn’t whisper to us beautiful secrets; but he whispers our strange and even somehow beautiful truths.

… on the Nevin Era at the University of Miami:

I’m starting to wonder if college football will someday start losing the benefit of its fans, too. Is it just me or are you, too, starting to feel guilty and dirty rooting for a sport where seemingly everybody is cheating in some form or fashion? Isn’t it hard to clap your hands for your favorite team when you have to hold your nose at the same time?

Sometimes, you wonder if you are as hypocritical as the sport itself. I mean, we like to act like we care about what is just and right, but do we really? If we did, would we still be packing the stadiums to watch the 100-yard lie?

Mr UD and I are driving home from our recent hiking trip in the Virginia mountains.

We’re maybe forty miles from home when we come to a massive roadworks project which blocks all car traffic. Large signs instruct you to get out of your car, walk to a nearby field of 747s, and fly one home.

Mr UD and I begin walking. I’m thinking I do remember reading somewhere that anyone can fly a 747.

The two of us get to the massive plane, and Mr UD’s game, he’s being a guy, he’s walking up the steps to the cockpit (Do 747s have cockpit steps?)… But I can tell he’s reluctant.

Suddenly I say: “Stop. That’s enough. There’s NO way you’re flying this plane. It’s not good for your health. It’s not safe. No.”

Somewhat sheepishly, Mr UD descends the steps.

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When I woke up, I told Mr UD the dream. I expected him to laugh. He didn’t laugh.

“It’s true,” he said, his voice a bit slurred by sleepiness. “All you have to do to fly a 747 is press a button. I mean, it has to be programmed and all.”

“Oh yeah?” I countered. “A field of 747s. Tons of people are taking off at the same time. How do you avoid hitting them?”

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(For new readers: UD is recovering from surgery and taking Percocet.)

The Heisman winner and quarterback of the national championship team had a father who apparently had offered his son’s services to Mississippi State for $180,000. The national championship basketball team was on probation. One of the game’s premier programs (USC) already is on probation, with another (Ohio State) ready to follow. The Ohio State case already resulted in the earlier-than-expected departures of Buckeyes coach Jim Tressel and potential Heisman contender Terrelle Pryor. Over the past 12 months or so, the 2004 BCS championship, the 2005 Heisman presentation and the 2009 ACC football championship have been vacated. And now we have one division – the ACC Coastal – that has half its membership (Georgia Tech, Miami and North Carolina) in hot water with the NCAA.

But that only scratches the surface.

Here’s a big one; and one of her favorites: All her life she’s heard and read pragmatic reality-based broad-shouldered boots on the ground straight-talking university sports enthusiast types ridicule humanities types as pie in the sky dreamers, limp-wristed do-nothing childish emotional deluded obscurantists jabbering pointlessly away in empty jargon.

Yet from the moment, ten years ago, she began attending NCAA and NCAA-related conferences, and heard one speaker after another intone words like integrity and principle to complacent audiences, UD has recognized that these NCAA words have exactly the same value as words like (counter-) hegemonic, imbrication, and modalities among certain groupings of English professors.

Hollow abstractions prop up both groups as they struggle to maintain a sense not only that they are united, but that they are not marginal, not incorrect in their beliefs, and – in the case of the NCAA crowd – not corrupt.

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Of the two groups, which is the more pitiable? The more deluded? Foucauldian academics occasionally score a meaningful cultural intervention; their efforts to radicalize the academy have had an impact. The NCAA crowd is caught in the eternal recurrence of win/loss, with winning as meaningless as losing.

“[S]o many colleges have bent the rules in the great academic act of winning meaningless football and basketball games,” writes Buzz Bissinger of his initial reaction to the University of Miami story, “that it was hard for me to muster much excitement.”

It is not only the ultimate meaninglessness of their endeavor – a meaninglessness made more acute by its location within that most ardently meaning-generating institution, the university – that the NCAA crowd must shield itself from; it is its filth. Few people, beyond sociopaths like Bernard Madoff and Nevin Shapiro, want to think of themselves as corrupt, but hundreds of NCAA administrators and NCAA-governed coaches, university presidents, and players certainly know that they are corrupt, that they play important parts in a corrupt system, if only by looking the other way when coaches and agents and fans and players around them are corrupt.

Bissinger argues that Miami football is so corrupt that the program should be permanently killed, and Donna Shalala

should be hauled before Congress, where the allegations against Miami are 10 times more serious than all the steroid nonsense paraded about in Washington.

Once she has done her murky dance of denial, a grand jury should be convened. If it turns out she did know the outrageous conduct of booster Nevin Shapiro — such as filling virtually an entire hotel floor with prostitutes for Miami players to gorge on, like grapes — she should be charged with perjury.

But… eh. She knew and she didn’t know. You know? It’s what I’ve been saying. She kind of knows that the games are meaningless and the people running them are disgusting… but a palm-lined campus is such a beautiful thing lalalalala. Pitiable.

Cam Newton is such a beautiful thing. A $2.2 billion contract with ESPN is such a beautiful thing. Pitiable.

And today, as always, these pitiable deluded people are the talk of the town.

Vox populi, University of Miami.

An editor at the Atlantic hesitates to join the crowd and call for the professionalization of college sports – paying players, dropping the whole goes to class thing, etc.

Why even keep the “student” in student-athlete? There’s really no reason players at a big program like Miami should take classes. After all, it’s not like they’re real students. They’re just football players, right? They’re pros. Aren’t they?

Ending amateurism sounds like a no-brainer. Maybe it is. But one inevitable consequence of it is that absolutely nothing would stand between college athletes and sleazy boosters like [Nevin] Shapiro. There’s something in me that hates that. Whether or not it’s rational or fair, there’s something in me that says we need a mechanism in place saying it’s not okay to take college players to strip clubs or buy them jewelry — just as something in me says, all evidence the contrary, it’s important for those players to be enrolled in classes.

Some thing… some je ne sais quoi… arrests this person on the verge of agreeing with everyone else that universities should house hundreds of people whose only function is to hurl their bodies around in ways that excite large numbers of people. Whose only reward is strippers who do the same thing. Some thing… some almost-forgotten, impossible-to-articulate inkling… some metaphysical scent has wafted to this person’s nostrils and whispered that it’s important for players to do something other than play for us when they’re at a college.

Something in this person “hates” “sleaze.” Strong words. But what’s really being said?

If you take the player out of the college altogether – if you place this person in the pros – the problem disappears. Which is kind of interesting. It suggests that the college as such represents a different world from … the world. The college seems to be a different world, with pressures of its own toward higher things, better and more serious ways of life. Remove the silently but powerfully remonstrating college from the totally familiar, totally unremarkable dissipation most people, given enough money, will want to live, and no problem.

No one cares, in other words, about the behavior of professional athletes (except when it’s really, really, really appalling) because we don’t expect anything different. People care about the behavior of university athletes — because they’re at universities. If the university has any distinction as a location – any distinction at all – it lies here, in its call to its students and faculty to think rather than instinctively act; to be serious rather than always be at play; to hate violence and to love reason; to prefer reflection to impulse.

To be sure, there are locations in America to whose name the word university is affixed – Auburn University, Texas Tech University – which we all recognize to be mere locations, quads in the sand, nothingness. Nothing but games and the scandals that accompany them. We don’t get upset about the scandals emanating from these locations. We barely cover them. If we cover them, it’s just to laugh at them.

But there are all these other places in our country, these universities, where we feel shame and sadness and confusion, where we feel, as the Atlantic editor writes, that it’s not okay when large numbers of well-organized, well-financed members of the university community dedicate themselves exclusively to games and greed.

Within this inchoate discomfort lies the beginning of personal and collective efforts to define university.