National Public Radio tries to wrap its brain around five percent six year graduation rates.

The University of Michigan goes down the tubes.

… has died.

… poem, Desert Places, I suddenly thought of Frank Zappa’s What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?.

I mean, it suddenly seemed a very close parallel – not in terms of style, but in terms of the idea that the scariest desert place is your own mind.

The students seemed to have heard of UD‘s beloved Zappa… Or were they just humoring her?

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

And then there’s this, by Philip Larkin.

If, My Darling

For the skirl of that bulletin unpicks the world like a knot,
And to hear how the past is past and the future neuter
Might knock my darling off her unpriceable pivot.

From the Minnesota Star-Tribune:

“It’s a disaster over there,” said Phil Ebner, once a captain of Minnesota’s golf team and a former board member of the “M” Club of former Gophers athletes. “The leadership just isn’t there, and it boggles the mind that they allow this guy to make mistake after mistake. It costs a lot of money.”

Specifically, [University of Minnesota Athletic Director Joel] Maturi’s critics say he has looked the other way while the men’s hockey and women’s basketball programs wither into irrelevance. The Gophers don’t sell out their new football stadium, costing the school critical revenue.

… Minnesota’s Legislature might consider reducing higher-education funding, which would force the 25-sport athletic department to sustain itself without the $2.3 million subsidy the university provides, a 3 percent contribution toward the $78 million athletic budget.

… A lawsuit brought by Jimmy Williams, a basketball assistant whom Smith tried to hire and Maturi rejected, cost the university a $1 million judgment last May. Katie Brenny, an associate golf coach, filed suit last week alleging she was marginalized because she is a lesbian, an allegation that risks another large payout. And speaking of payouts, firing basketball coach Dan Monson and two football coaches, Brewster and Glen Mason, meant paying buyouts totaling roughly $6 million.

It just flew by my office window.

But let’s back up and do a longer Snapshots from Home post.

I woke this morning from a dream whose last scene had me surveying our entirely redecorated (lots of olive trees) living room, and thinking about how clever Mr UD was to have thought of this new arrangement.

Before I left for campus, I printed out my invitation to a reading tonight at the Irish Embassy.

On the train, I made a mental list of the day’s activities:

~ Office hours, during which my student Gabe will interview me for the campus newspaper. Subject: What’s it like to have alumni auditors in your classes?

~ Lunch with Rosemary, a student of mine from last semester, and a fellow ‘thesdan.

~ David Brooks’ recent reference to what he calls “the Composure Class” has me thinking about Philip Rieff’s Psychological Man. I will mull over this today.

~ After lunch, I will get passport photos taken. I’m going to Ireland in March.

~ After the embassy event, I’ll go home and prepare for Thursday’s classes.

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UPDATE:

“Thank goodness you’re here, Gabe. I’ve been reading about Francesca Woodman and getting depressed. Let’s change the subject to alumni auditors, quick!”

“Okay. Now I’m a visual guy and I can’t write fast. So be patient as I take notes.”

“Okay.”

“So there were three alumni auditors in the Aesthetics class I took with you last semester, and I understand you often have alumni auditors in your class. What’s that like? Does it change things? How?”

I’ll link to the GW Hatchet piece that contains my answer to this and other questions.

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UPDATE:

Rosemary (who turns out to be the daughter of Doyle McManus) and I eat Thai food and chat about our ‘thesdan lives.  After lunch, we walk around the city looking for a place that takes passport photos.  I get it done at a FedEx store off Connecticut Avenue.  Takes three minutes.

It’s a chilly day, but I don’t really want to admit this, so I carry my coat and shiver.

Back at GW, a Linguistic Ambiguity moment:  I’m walking by the elevators on my floor of Academic Center, and I hear an elegantly dressed man say to his friend, “I have no class.”

Was this some sort of false modesty?  He was very classy.

No.  He was talking about his class schedule for today.

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

7:oo

Irish Embassy

Washington DC

Since I know no one, mingling isn’t going to work – at least I don’t know how to make it work.  So I’ve taken a drink from a man with a tray, and I’ve taken my trusty notebook, and I’ve taken a seat in the reading room.

The Irish Embassy is… an embassy.  Big brick house with carpeted rooms and with fireplaces.  A grand piano with framed color photographs of meet and greets.  Vague smell of food for the reception after.  From curtained windows, excellent night views all the way down Connecticut Avenue.  A portrait of – Wolfe Tone? – over the fireplace.

Odd day for me.  Personally, as Stephen Dedalus says, I detest action.  And yet I’ve packed a great deal into today.  Lunch with a student.  An interview.  Passport photos.  Long city walks.  Office hours.  And now this – an embassy event.

The novelist who will read to us tonight – Joseph O’Connor – is Sinead O’Connor’s brother!

His book, Ghost Light, is a love story based on a relationship the playwright Synge had with an actress, Molly Allgood.

O’Connor reads beautifully, and it’s always a pleasure for UD to hear an Irish accent.

The writing is pleasant, sentimental, a gentle evocation of a certain time and of two lovers. I guess O’Connor’s sister got all the roughness.

After he’s finished reading, an audience member asks a question about the burden of Irish literary history.  Does O’Connor feel oppressed as a writer by the weight of Joyce, Yeats, and the rest?

In response, O’Connor says something rather beautiful.

“These writers were, for me, growing up, our Easter Island gods.  We put them on our currency.  They were the only Irish who had accomplished anything internationally… When I was young, we Irish sometimes felt as though we lived in a place that didn’t exist at all.  This was before U2 and Riverdance and all of that.  My mother would say to me, ‘This is a little country where we don’t do things very well.  But we have Yeats.  We have Joyce.’  The arts gave us dignity.”

“Well said,” whispered UD.

And then she closed her notebook and got her coat from the check room and went out into the cold clear night.

The moon was high and full, its canyons absolutely clear.  The radiance of the moon made long white clouds stand out against a blueblack sky.

UD didn’t put on her coat.  The room had been hot, and she wanted the evening air on her skin.

As she turned onto R Street toward Connecticut – nearby was Restaurant Nora, where the President celebrated his last birthday, and, stretching before her, bright with seasonal lights, were the two blocks of R Street leading to the intersection – she felt with full force the particular beauty of her city.  Up ahead the big black and white Teaism banner waved.  The book-lined interiors of old stone townhouses glowed at her.  UD‘s heart went pitapat.

…whose result (If you’re going to learn, you must read.) is discussed here.

And most of it’s coming from students, not professors.

He runs an incredibly busy, successful, architectural design firm.

He’s just taken on a second academic appointment: Judge Widney Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California.

“It’s unclear what classes, if any, Gehry will be teaching in future semesters at USC.”

… writing.

From Central Michigan Life:

“We as professors need to be flexible with electronic usage i[n] the classroom,” [Central Michigan University journalism professor Mary Pat Lichtman] said. “But there needs to be cooperation from the students.”

Lichtman said college should be treated as a job with professors as students’ employers, and added that if students wouldn’t text in a meeting they shouldn’t do it in the classroom either.

As 2011 begins, pending 2010 financial reports show the largest deficit exists in Athletics.

GPSA president Lissa Knudsen said that is unacceptable.

“It’s very disturbing, and we want to know what the plan is,” she said. “How are they going to stop this hemorrhaging of resources, especially in times like these … We need to be focused on academics.”

A “consolidated financial report” for the first one-third of the year, July-October, lists an Athletics deficit of more than $3.1 million. The report says Athletics’ “unfavorable net margin” is the result from the timing of football expense versus football revenue, and expected football revenue will not meet the budgeted level.

What’s interesting about this story is that no law school – far as I know – has responded to the charges. Except to shrug their shoulders and express some variant of It’s a free country and there’s a sucker born every minute.

… plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

T.S. Eliot’s morbid poem says “The whole earth is our hospital.”

The wounded surgeon is the subject of a new study.

Surgeons “who practiced in an academic medical center” showed lower rates of suicidal ideation.

… is a regular feature of University Diaries. UD is a veteran blood donor, and she donates at the National Institutes of Health. This is just down the street from Suburban Hospital, where Sargent Shriver was admitted yesterday.

NIH is also the place where UD‘s father, an immunologist who studied cancer, spent his career. She likes to give at NIH because walking its campus and halls reminds her of his happy years there.

So after lunch with Georgia, once her student and now her friend (they went to Le Pain Quotidien in ‘thesda), she asked Georgia to drop her off at NIH.

This being the federal government and all, she and Georgia had to get out of her car, and get patted down, and (while someone checked the car’s trunk and back seat) show identification, in order to get visitors’ passes. UD apologized to Georgia, who said, “I’m happy to do this! I’m too uncomfortable with the procedure to give blood myself, but the fuss makes me feel as though I’m doing my bit.”

Once at the Clinical Center, UD walked its eerily empty halls (holiday today) to the distant blood bank. The security guards had assured me that the blood bank was open.

It was closed. But the Plateletpheresis Center was open, and UD was, she explained to the woman working there, up for that.

“Hm. It’s pretty late for you to donate today. Would you be willing to make an appointment for later?”

After they put together a platelets date for UD, she again trekked the long corridors of the Clinical Center, all the while recalling her lab-coated father.

The afternoon was cold and gray; the trees were gray, with a few white trunks. She descended the very slow Medical Center Metro escalator with its cold white archway, and she thought of a line she’d just read in the Norman Maclean Reader, the book she was carrying with her.

His prose never moves far from a sense of despair, a fear that life merely happens, incapable of being charged with meaning and grace.