… Mike Leach.
A perfect match.
For World AIDS Day:
UD has long been haunted by the song Fairy Book Lines, words by Charles Barber, music, Donald St. Pierre.
You can hear a bit of the song here, on the Amazon page for the AIDS Quilt Songbook (scroll down for music samples).
For me, the drifty music and drifty words capture the bitter business of dying. They capture the peculiar process by which the body, in a modern world of medicine, returns to earth.
****************************
Death be nimble –
life was quick
Efficiency’s a modern trope
To be expected
with impatience
Not less
when bearing death
Or a low-burning illness
slow as memory.
Though death’s old-fashioned
and enters the room
Like Sonnambula,
bearing a burning candlestick.
Double, double
toil and trouble;
Triple sadness,
endless sorrow:
Like friends sitting too long
by the hospital bed—
Like the T.V. watching you
with paralyzing glare;
While the night-nurses
in soft-soled shoes
Wheel in the confections
to ensure your misery
Will last a long tomorrow.
The world’s so full
of a number of things
Now never to be savored
Never to fire
a subordinate employee
Destroy a marriage
position an M1A1 tank
On desert children.
Marveling at such achievements
is a sure way
To gladly sacrifice
a number of things
The world has always favored.
Poor old Charlie,
he swallowed a fly;
The fly was drunk
with M.A.I.
Buzzed here buzzed there
Till a well-seasoned fever
stitched in hues
Of delirium-like gold,
cooked in a broth
Of bacterium stock,
festering with forgotten dreams,
Took hold—took him—took life.
Twinkle twinkle
eyes in pain;
Retinitis makes
its awful gain.
Eyesight’s a form of breathing
–like glass
Full and rich with freedom.
Now a bag
slides over the head
too bad!
So long to the world
So long desired:
darkness sucks you down its drain.
Fly away, fly away
over the sea,
Sun-loving sick boy,
for summer is done.
First the pneumonia,
canceling the lung,
Followed by a possible list
of viral, bacterial, parasitical,
And let us not forget fungal.
The slow-covering growth,
so like nature,
Slowly returning the body to earth,
adrift in underground.
… win this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
A university’s real mission, which ought to make everything else pale by comparison, involves the education of young people and the advancement of knowledge. It is not to play football on television.
From an editorial about the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the News and Observer.
… Miami gets a bad rap as a university with no money. If that’s what you truly believe, take some time to go walk around the downtown medical campus. Start exploring and you’ll never feel like UM has a lack of funds ever again. The money is absolutely there; the only question is the willingness to spend it on athletics.
… PLEASE STOP thinking or insinuating that [President] Donna Shalala and [athletic director] Kirby [Hocutt] don’t want to win, or that they’d prefer to have a bunch of Rhodes Scholars who lose four or five games per year. That sentiment is beyond ridiculous. Both the president and athletic director want to win badly, but obviously want to do so the right way – with players going to class and not revisiting UM’s “Thug U” days.
When I think back to great UM teams, I don’t remember a bunch of guys getting arrested or failing out of school. Sure, there were some rough around the edges guys, but in all reality, no more than any other school.
Words of wisdom from one of America’s stupidest schools.
“[I]nstead of providing a solid pathway to the middle class, (for-profits) are paving a path into the subbasement of the American economy.”
From a just-issued report on for-profit colleges.
… from University Diaries at her satellite campus, Inside Higher Education.
You have to admit he’s original.
His is the last recipe on the page: Gabe: Roasted Turkey Ravioli. If you like it, subscribe, and then click on LIKE IT to vote for it. If Gabe gets enough votes, he wins a scholarship to attend the Culinary Institute of America.
You’ve met UD‘s Garrett Park neighbor, the insanely precocious chef Gabe Mandel, on this blog before.
He’s also been featured in the Washington Post.
A vault in Nanterre
Is the location where
They’re keeping a bunch of Picassos.
Monsieur Le Guennec?
The master’s vieux mec?
I fear that his asso is grasso.
Killing becomes a drug, and it is really addictive. [Turn the sound down on the link.] I had a really hard time with this problem when I returned to the United States, because turning this addiction off was impossible… I still feel the addictions running through my blood and throughout my body, but now I know how to keep myself composed and keep order in myself, my mind.
Whatever else you want to say about this writing, produced by an American veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, you have to admit it’s pretty good. Straightforward, direct, honest. The image of the addictions “running” through the writer’s blood is excellent.
The essay in which it appeared earned an A in a college writing course. Indeed, so impressed was the writer’s professor that she encouraged him to publish it in the school newspaper.
That’s when administrators saw it. They’ve barred him from campus until he gets a psychiatric evaluation.
***********************************
Journalists covering the story have had no difficulty finding an idiot to insist that a writer who stresses the control he now has over himself has actually written “a cry for help… [He] clearly wants and needs a psychiatric consultation.”
***********************************
Here’s how the college should have handled this. By all means call the guy in for a chat with the provost or whoever. Don’t immediately hit him up with You’re scary. You need to get your head examined. Just talk to him. Have a campus shrink join you for the chat. Give him a chance to demonstrate that he’s okay – a reflective, damaged person working out his thoughts about his experiences in an essay.
Maybe the chat reveals that he is unhinged. Then the college can in good conscience make him keep his distance. But just because a person has written in an unnerving way about what it means to be a soldier does not mean he should be silenced.
… there’s beer, get used to it.
The chair of the Northeastern Illinois University board of trustees celebrates a university president who gave tenure to a fraud who graduated from a diploma mill.
Tenuring a diploma mill fraud. That’s the sort of thing you do when you are either corrupt beyond belief, or exceedingly mentally feeble.
Only one thing to do with joke presidents.
Might want to take a look at the board of trustees, too.
… does a brief feature on one of the university’s soon-to-be famous trustees.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte