Classy.

College President Elizabeth Tice’s office is locked most of the time. She is located in California and visits the Clinton [Iowa] campus maybe twice a year. That doesn’t seem to hinder her work there, thanks to technology that allows for easy communication, despite the distance, [Ashford University’s vice president] said.

…died.

His great poem, The Graveyard by the Sea, is a long stroll through mortality, a mental narrative that begins in an attitude of post-human calm, and then gradually returns to the agon of ongoing existence.

The poet is walking through a cemetery that overlooks the sea. He begins with an epigraph from Pindar, reminding him to “make what you can of the possible.”

Here are some excerpts (I’ve just given a link up there to the entire poem. Here’s another translation.), with a bit of commentary.

The sea, the sea, the recommencing yet!
O recompense, in long abstraction set
Over the gods’ own calm, to gaze and gaze.

The poet begins by feeling the vast sense of calm anyone would feel perched above quiet waves, beneath a quiet blue sky, and adjacent to silent white tombstones and mausoleums. Yet the sea itself is a principle of infinite movement – recommencing yet – always beginning anew – and the poet must know that he gazes at it not as a god but as a man whose own movement through the world will end.

… what a peace we fancy here below!
Over a blue abyss the noon at pause
– Pure products, then, of an eternal cause
Time’s all a shimmer, and to dream’s to know.

The poet still fancies himself a god, one among many pure products in an eternal noontime pause.

O silence, mine! … and structure in the soul
With domes of gold, tile over tile… you, Roof!

The silence is not merely the world’s; it is the poet’s. He continues to align himself with the architecture of eternity (structure in the soul).

I scale pure heights and grow at home here …

I could get used to this place, to this sense of immunity from my own humanity.

But now the poet smells perishable fruit from nearby trees, and

I sniff in this my drift – to ash in air.
Soul’s worn away…

I’ll burn to nothingness under this same hot sun; my very life is a process of erosion.

On mansions of the dead my shadow trails
With many a lesson in its meager length.

Yes, this is my reality. I’m a meager body with a meager shadow, pretending the world is my mansion.

My true location is

Between the nothing and the pure event.
I on the edge of grandeur hang and hark:
The reservoir reverberant, surly, dark
– Threats of erosion in the echo sent.

Here is where I live – after the nothingness that prevailed before my birth, and before the realm of the eternal into which I will eventually be absorbed. I struggle to write from this place, always just on the edge of grandeur, always stuck in the realm of relative inexpressivity. I throw my words into the reverberating ocean, but what comes back is precisely a reminder of my transience.

Yet there’s something therapeutic about this stark encounter with death and infinity:

Once here, the future yawns, an empty stare.
The curt cicada grates the bone-dry air.
All’s burnt away, undone, in sky refined
To some astringent essence. Wide debris –
Life, with its wild addiction not to be!
Here bitterness is sweet, and clear the mind.

What a line – life with its wild addiction not to be… Exclaimed as the poet surveys the immensity of death strewn all about him. As if we can’t wait to go, as if the very pleasure and even obsession of our lives is to achieve the end of our lives. A bitter thought but clarifying, like this essential scene.

Yet while we live, we alone can give voice to the earth and its mysteries. And so we are not negligible; we are in fact indispensable:

Impeccable head, tiara without flaw,
See I’m the secret change astir in you.

… The fears you move – I hold them, I alone.
Repentance, doubt, compulsion, moods I’ve known
Show as your noble diamond’s only blur.

Still, dead is dead, and it’s no good pretending that

When you’re a mist, your singing lips can live…
Away! The world’s in flight! My flesh a sieve.
Days of the holy hankering finish too.

A few more stanzas of wry and melancholy meditation on our fate (“Shovels of earth sent packing to your beds.”) follow; and then there’s a dramatic transition:

Off with those poses of a thoughtful dunce!
Revel in wind; it quickens! Drink and thrive!
A coolness breathing from the open sea
Restores – O vigor of salt! – my soul for me!
Plunge in the surf! Come springing out, alive!

… The freshening wind! Let’s live, or try to! Look,
The vast air ruffles, and claps shut my book;
Reckless, the surf goes geysering on the rocks.
Sun-spangled pages, dazzled, blow away!
Shatter in a jubilant spray
This quiet roof…

No more writing, reading, pondering; time rather to put bittersweet astringency behind me and take up my life, just as it is, once again.

A gifted writer and singer, she tried but failed to overcome drug and alcohol addiction.

UD thanks David for letting her know.

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From a Jon Pareles essay:

Ms. Winehouse has often sung about harmful appetites, not just in “Rehab” but in “Addicted” (about a freeloading pot smoker) and in “Back to Black,” in which she sings, “You love blow and I love puff/And life is like a pipe.” Back when the album was released, it sounded as if she already had some wry perspective. She didn’t have to get any more “real” than that… [Why did Winehouse let] someone shoot video, in a private setting, of her puffing [a crack] pipe …? Maybe it’s some version of “keepin’ it real,” the fallacy that insists art must be autobiographical to be worthwhile, as if art were documentation rather than storytelling. Maybe it’s obliviousness, although, since the camera followed her around, she was likely to know it was there. Maybe she mistakenly trusted that whoever made the video would resist another temptation: the potential profit to be made providing it to a tabloid.

Perhaps Ms. Winehouse misunderstood what should be clear in the age of the Internet: Everything recorded can be duplicated and distributed. And possibly the video was, in its own bleary way, a kind of performance. She is keeping her audience informed if not exactly entertained.

… journalism is a distinction Christopher Hitchens introduces (new one on me, at least) in a recent post about Rupert Murdoch; but the distinction also works in ranking bottom-feeder universities. Gutter would be for-profit online tax siphons; sewer would be their kissing cousins, the diploma mills.

For those, like UD, who enjoy the spectacle of a real shitstorm, there’s this story out of Kentucky:

A Louisville-based ministry and a large Arizona church are suing each other over the disputed sale of an unaccredited online university last year, each accusing the other of fraud.

Child of the King Ministries of Louisville agreed to sell an entity called American International University for $400,000 to the Phoenix-based Church for the Nations in May 2010, both lawsuits say.

Okay, so straightforward sale of a diploma mill from one house of God to another… Happens every day… Only Church for the Nations is so dumb it thought a diploma mill… I dunno… was something… had assets or something rather than just being a website that sold pieces of paper…

The church’s lawsuit said the [diploma mill owner church] claimed the university had numerous accreditations, affiliations with other schools and a regular cash flow of between $15,000 and $30,000 from foreign students who wanted a credential from an American institution.

That church… Ah say that church didn’t get the no honor among thieves memo…

Looks like them big tough guys at the coalface can’t take a little heat.

A Wyoming politician has expressed his own displeasure with a University of Wyoming artwork attacking coal’s environmental effects in this way:

[E]very now and then, you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from.

See, folks at the University of Wyoming don’t understand that ideas critical of funding sources are forbidden. This here’s a kind of learning opportunity for them in the limits of free expression.

“[S]haring funds between the Athletics Department and the [University of Iowa] is a good idea; it would go a long way toward alleviating the university’s budget woes and prevent the Athletics Department from being an essentially independent corporation using the UI’s name, trademarks, and academic allure.”

With state funds falling, public big-time sports universities are wondering why they get so little of the tens of millions generated by their programs. Administrators patiently explain that coaches need millions and millions of dollars in compensation every year just to get by, but students and faculty aren’t listening. Here’s the editorial board of UI’s newspaper:

The university’s Athletics Department predicts revenues in excess of $70 million for fiscal 2011. With the UI facing an $8 million decrease in state appropriations, there’s a cogent argument for at least pulling enough from the athletics budget to make up the difference.

After all:

Kinnick Stadium will [soon] be rumbling with more than 70,000 rabid football fans, many of them university students. Few will probably take the time to consider the sheer magnitude of wealth concentrated around them…

Felix Salmon reviews Lawrence Summers’ Harvard presidency (get all the details you want by typing any phrase from his sentence into this blog’s search engine).

He forgets to mention his fabled multi-tasking. As Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times: “That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time.”

But anyway, everyone’s talking, today, about Summers’ use, in a recent interview, of the word asshole to describe two notorious Harvard students – the Winklevoss twins:

If an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.

So there’s a wee wumpus this morning about a treasury secretary and a university president and all calling someone an asshole. Who cares. But what this does do is allow me to share with you one of my favorite scientific articles. It originally appeared in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and has been collected in a book called Sex as a Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble.

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

Title: THE AH GENE: Implications for Genetic Counseling

Excerpts: “[We wish to discuss] evidence supporting the existence of a gene (henceforth called the AH gene) that predisposes an individual to chronic behavior in an obnoxious, boorish, selfish, overbearing, and generally offensive manner…. [T]he percentage of adults in the United States exhibiting chronic AH behavior is about 32% (95% confidence interval, 27-37%)… [Being] a carrier of one of … three genotypes is strongly associated with exhibiting chronic AH behavior (i.e. with being phenotypically a “real AH”)… [It] can be argued that almost all of the world’s problems are due to some degree to the influence of the AH gene….”

… Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud has died.

He was Sigmund Freud’s grandson. In a recent interview, he said: “I am not at all introspective.”

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

He was interested in presence, and not only human presence: a lightbulb’s glare, a dog’s leg, a horse’s arse, a frayed bit of carpet. The language with which he described people and things, animals and lovers, atmosphere and futility, was a frightening construction. I believe he shared more with his psychoanalyst grandfather than he liked to admit.

Yes, it’s come to this in Israel. Women from Hebrew University now ride buses through religious neighborhoods specifically to test whether a recent court decision that – get ready for it – women don’t, like blacks in America before Rosa Parks, have to sit at the back of the bus is actually being honored.

Internships are available for American college students:

Amy Milin, a recent Florida Atlantic University graduate, rode 60 buses during her three-month internship… “There were times a group of people crowded around me and said I don’t belong here and I’m ruining their religion,” she said.

These women are on the front lines of gender justice. That these battles have to be fought in Israel is a shondah.

Police Search for Ann Arbor Rapist as Annual Art Fair Kicks Off

And then, for $5,000 a pop, Egija Kuka sold these United States Medical Licensing Exam questions to medical students who had in the past repeatedly failed the test. Kuka promised them they’d pass this time.

“The National Board of Medical Examiners first grew suspicious of Optima University’s owners in 2008 because Kuka took the test several times and scored poorly each time.”

She wasn’t taking it; she was photographing it.

Many doctors who cheated their way through the test now stand to lose their licenses.

If you’ve read Marcia Angell on antidepressants, you’re unlikely to be surprised by a recent study suggesting that “individuals who use antidepressants are much more likely to suffer relapses of major depression than those who use no medication at all… [P]eople who have not been taking any medication are at a 25 per cent risk of relapse, compared to 42 per cent or higher for those who have taken and gone off an antidepressant.” Paul Andrews, of McMaster University, argues that “antidepressants interfere with the brain’s natural self-regulation of serotonin and other neurotransmitters, and… the brain can overcorrect once medication is suspended, triggering new depression.”

In her much-discussed New York Review of Books essay, Angell reviews the similar arguments of Robert Whitaker:

If psychoactive drugs do cause harm, as Whitaker contends, what is the mechanism? The answer, he believes, lies in their effects on neurotransmitters. It is well understood that psychoactive drugs disturb neurotransmitter function, even if that was not the cause of the illness in the first place. Whitaker describes a chain of effects. When, for example, an SSRI antidepressant like Celexa increases serotonin levels in synapses, it stimulates compensatory changes through a process called negative feedback. In response to the high levels of serotonin, the neurons that secrete it (presynaptic neurons) release less of it, and the postsynaptic neurons become desensitized to it. In effect, the brain is trying to nullify the drug’s effects.

… With long-term use of psychoactive drugs, the result is, in the words of Steve Hyman, a former director of the NIMH and until recently provost of Harvard University, “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function.” As quoted by Whitaker, the brain, Hyman wrote, begins to function in a manner “qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state.” After several weeks on psychoactive drugs, the brain’s compensatory efforts begin to fail, and side effects emerge that reflect the mechanism of action of the drugs. For example, the SSRIs may cause episodes of mania, because of the excess of serotonin. Antipsychotics cause side effects that resemble Parkinson’s disease, because of the depletion of dopamine (which is also depleted in Parkinson’s disease). As side effects emerge, they are often treated by other drugs, and many patients end up on a cocktail of psychoactive drugs prescribed for a cocktail of diagnoses. The episodes of mania caused by antidepressants may lead to a new diagnosis of “bipolar disorder” and treatment with a “mood stabilizer,” such as Depokote (an anticonvulsant) plus one of the newer antipsychotic drugs. And so on.

Some patients take as many as six psychoactive drugs daily. One well- respected researcher, Nancy Andreasen, and her colleagues published evidence that the use of antipsychotic drugs is associated with shrinkage of the brain, and that the effect is directly related to the dose and duration of treatment. As Andreasen explained to The New York Times, “The prefrontal cortex doesn’t get the input it needs and is being shut down by drugs. That reduces the psychotic symptoms. It also causes the prefrontal cortex to slowly atrophy.”*

Getting off the drugs is exceedingly difficult, according to Whitaker, because when they are withdrawn the compensatory mechanisms are left unopposed. When Celexa is withdrawn, serotonin levels fall precipitously because the presynaptic neurons are not releasing normal amounts and the postsynaptic neurons no longer have enough receptors for it. Similarly, when an antipsychotic is withdrawn, dopamine levels may skyrocket. The symptoms produced by withdrawing psychoactive drugs are often confused with relapses of the original disorder, which can lead psychiatrists to resume drug treatment, perhaps at higher doses.

The fact that the high school football talk has gone on unfettered for the better part of six months with nary a public response/rebuke from the NCAA is unimaginable. The fact that ESPN is very publicly braying about high school prospects is unconscionable — but not nearly as unconscionable as the NCAA allowing this discussion half a year after it should’ve been shutdown to continue on.

He’s talking about the humongous new network deal between the University of Texas and ESPN. Programming will include “high school football games in the state of Texas,” which is to say that the Longhorn Network will televise “potential football recruits on a television network dedicated to a single university.” It would seem to give the University of Texas an unfair advantage.

[I]f televising potential in-state — and specifically targeted out-of-state — recruits on your own television network is not a violation, how could The Association ever again look any school in the eyes in the future and accuse them of doing something illicit in gaining an advantage in recruiting?

The writer seems shocked that the NCAA hasn’t done anything; but here’s UD‘s theory. Although it does nothing to stem big-time university sports corruption, the NCAA is the busiest organization in the world. It’s like tax season at the IRS there every single day. They have simply run out of staff.

….plays ball.