Also, there is a drive [at American universities] to be successful in sports, something that perhaps has a huge focus in the US (though anyone who has experienced the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race can attest it is felt elsewhere in the world as well).
Perhaps.
Quite.
Puh-leeze. UD‘s a big Obama fan. But Obama’s a huge sports fan, a jock, and there’s no way this meeting will be anything other than backslapping and stats chat. Members of Congress are worse than Obama.
And… college football leaders? Cynical, greedy NCAA? Even greedier coaches? University presidents whoring after tens of billions in tv rights?
No.
As one commenter notes, “sports revenues and reputation are replacing public support for academics.”
University football and basketball are America’s debraining machines.
… available in these fifty states. Their faculty correctly picks up on the fact that they’re graduating many of the masterminds who’ve royally fucked up the country. They think the solution to this is ethics training, in which men and women who’ve had twenty years to learn basic decency are brought from bad to good via wittle teeny morality scenarios…
This approach, called “Giving Voice to Values,” begins from the assumption that there will always be those who push and even break society’s laws and ethical norms. But there will also be those who would rather observe them, if they believed they had the skills, the competency, and the literal practice in how to do so. Rather than “teaching ethics,” this approach teaches managers how to be ethical, enabling them to believe they have a choice.
Turns out MBA students are trembling mutes, like King George before he found his voice… Turns out they don’t even believe they have a choice to behave well… We must enable these lost souls…
Another B-school ethics person is excited because of some of the moral paragons who are on the ethics case:
My colleagues and I are encouraged that some B-schools have sought help from higher-ambition leaders themselves — people like Ken Freeman, former CEO of Quest Diagnostics, now dean of Boston University’s School of Management, and Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, now teaching leadership development at HBS.
Bill George. Medtronic. Well, if higher ambition means the sky’s the limit for personal compensation, yes. Hard to find a bigger cheerleader for outrageous salaries than Bill, who, from his Goldman Sachs director’s chair, lustily praises greed. What a moral example Bill set by his silence about the injuries he inflicted by awarding those salaries to Goldman Sachs people!
In a Bloomberg article titled Goldman’s Silent Board, Richard Teitelbaum reminds us of Bill’s outstanding service:
The board members said nothing publicly, for instance, when on April 16 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit alleging Goldman had committed fraud in underwriting and marketing a mortgage-related security called Abacus 2007-AC1 without disclosing to clients that a bearish hedge fund customer, Paulson & Co., was involved in creating it.
Goldman calls the SEC suit “completely unfounded.”
Federal prosecutors in New York are also investigating Goldman transactions to determine whether to pursue a criminal fraud case, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Nell Minow, co-founder of the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library, a governance research firm, says that when the SEC suit was filed, the outside directors should have immediately set up a committee to investigate, hired independent counsel and announced that they would make the results of their probe public.
Wells NoticeThe board should also have been riding herd on its members’ stock trades, says Cornell University Law School Professor Robert Hockett, who specializes in financial regulation from his office in Ithaca, New York. Goldman spokesman Lucas van Praag says directors are periodically informed of such trades. The bank received a Wells notice dated July 28, 2009, notifying the firm that it was the target of an SEC fraud investigation.
At least three company executives, including Vice Chairman Michael Evans, unloaded more than $27 million of Goldman stock from October 2009 through February 2010 in open market sales unrelated to the recent exercise of options or delivery of restricted stock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Van Praag says Goldman’s board was informed of the Wells notice, which was not made public until after the SEC filed its suit. He says the firm’s lawyers determined it wasn’t material.
“On the face of it, the idea that that would not be material — I can’t imagine anybody saying that with a straight face,” Hockett says.
Well, why should it be material to Bill “Bankers are Movie Stars” George?
“Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine,” explains Paul Krugman, and ain’t it the truth, Ruth.
Habermas spells out precisely why he sees Europe as a project for civilization that must not be allowed to fail, and why the “global community” is not only feasible, but also necessary to reconcile democracy with capitalism. Otherwise, as he puts it, we run the risk of a kind of permanent state of emergency — otherwise the countries will simply be driven by the markets.
… [Why does Habermas take] the topic of Europe so personally[?]. It has to do with the evil Germany of yesteryear and the good Europe of tomorrow, with the transformation of past to future, with a continent that was once torn apart by guilt — and is now torn apart by debt.
… her readers. You come from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Hong Kong… And the US of A. You email me, with tips and ideas and limericks. You leave wonderful comments. You lurk, returning silently day after day to University Diaries, making whatever you make of it. You share what I write with your students, your colleagues.
You wrote me warm and encouraging emails this summer, after my operation.
I don’t know most of you. But today I want to say, with Jimmy Durante (sort of): Thank you, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.
… continues (background here), with Brinkley reporting that his Rice University students applauded when he returned to the classroom.
Young’s spokesperson failed to address his employer’s provocative behavior at the hearing, but assured everyone that the whole dustup had to do with “an attempt by an author to create a stir and sell books.”
UD thinks the real problem is that Young was not adequately briefed. People like Young think all professors are ivory tower haughties (Young actually used the phrase “ivory tower” in one of his spews against Brinkley) ripe for rolling by rough-hewn men of the people. Imagine Young’s surprise on discovering that some intellectuals can ratchet their rhetoric right down to the gutter if the occasion warrants. Not all intellectuals can do this; but it’s the job of Young’s staff to identify those who can.
“Wow. Fangor really churned out the propaganda in his younger days,” said UD to Mr UD this morning over breakfast. “There’s a big exhibit in Warsaw of tons of his commie posters.” She showed Mr UD this one by their old friend, of the yearning big-eyed woman with the fraternal nations of the world around her neck.
“1955 World Festival of Youth and Students,” he mused. “You know, I think I learned to read during that festival. They gave out posters with national flags on the front; and on the back, for each country, little descriptive paragraphs. I think that was the first thing I read.”
… you’ve got to get her the hell out.
Mr. Paterno had given him an ultimatum: Fire her, or Mr. Paterno would stop fund-raising for the school.
***********************************
UD thanks Jeff.
The poet first remembers attending the wedding of a passionate woman with whom he’d once had a passionate affair. Out of fear and conventionality, she’s marrying a dull steady man. The poet’s contribution to the event is the buying and strewing of a thousand red and white roses — a parting gesture of ardor for a woman consigning herself to passionlessness.
Now, much older, the poet considers his own younger life.
There is no feast but energy. All men
know — have known and will remember
again and again — what food that is
for the running young wolf of the rare days
when shapes fall from the air
and may be had for the leaping.
Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty.
And how they are instantly nothing —
a commotion in the air and in the blood.
— And how they are endlessly all.
———————————
The thanksgiving feast honors the gift of spiritedness — sheer visceral delight in the world, an adequacy to the world’s challenge to us to be full of life, as the world is full of life. Vibrancy comes at us and we, especially when young, leap up to it, tear at it for sustenance. Yet these passionate fulfillments “are instantly nothing – / A commotion in the air and in the blood.” They come and go, overwhelming us and vanishing; and as we age the possibility of vibrancy lessens.
Still, if they are in the instant nothing, they are also “endlessly all.” We hoard these moments, drawing from our store of them a sort of second-level vibrancy that also sustains us.
… I remember the feasts of my life,
their every flowing. I remember
the wolf all men remember in his blood.
I remember the air become
a feast of flowers.
The poet gives thanks, then, for the leap, and for the after-leap; for the enlivening memory of the original flowering.
… It is the words starve us, the act that feeds.
The air trembling with the white wicks
of its falling encloses us. To be
perfect, I suppose, we must be brief.
The long thing is to remember
imperfectly, dirtying with gratitude
the grave of abundance. O flower-banked,
air-dazzling, and abundant woman,
though the young wolf is dead, all men
know — have known and must remember —
You.
The poet begins with typical ambivalence about his vocation: Words are a kind of enervation; what you want is the leaping. Act now, live all you can, because the flame of life will be drawn out of us as fire is drawn up and out of a candle. To be sure, any life’s perfect moments of bliss will be brief; but the way to play out the rest of your existence is with fidelity to those moments, always remembering and always being grateful for them. The grave of abundance is polished, quiet, sealed; to it you must bring your grateful “dirtying” – your messy, foggily recalled, erotically insistent, earthily alive tribute to the vibrancy that was.
When you’re a for-profit online educational outfit, first you land the student and then you, well, land the student. Teaching is essentially air traffic control, bringing the on-screen messages that represent your student in for a Pass.
Given huge enrollments, we’re talking pretty unfriendly skies here, skies clogged with carriers. And given bottom-line pressures, the mandate is to make the skies ever more crowded, as well as to keep your immense student fleet intact.
The pressure to pass students on through their programs, and the pressure on the air traffic controllers of sheer numbers, creates the notoriously shoddy standards of these schools — a shoddiness easy to expose if you only take the trouble.
As did the GAO, which simply enrolled investigators at various for-profits and watched the schools do what they do.
Investigators attempted to enroll using fictitious identities or credentials and successfully did so at 12 of 15 colleges …
Duh. We’re running a business here! The GAO report goes on to note rampant cheating, and rampant tolerance of it… I mean, you get a double whammy cheating-wise at the online for-profits. Online, in any educational context, is a big fat invitation to cheat your way through a course (to begin with, there’s no way to verify that you are who you say you are); add the faceless drudge handling hundreds of students at the for-profit outfit, a drudge primarily motivated to move paying customers through courses, and whaddaya expect?
It all comes together beautifully when students at these outfits realize no one respects their degree. They can’t get a job. And now they have all these big loans to repay.
Andrew Sullivan quotes Newt Gingrich:
“The Congressional Budget Office is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”
Sullivan then comments:
The CBO is just a branch of the Congress that is widely respected for its scores for legislation and refuses to build into its calculations now-discredited theories about how cutting taxes increases revenues, among other such “conservative” innovations in math. To pick on the CBO as “socialist” is to attack, as Newt has since he first appeared in politics, yet another respected institution in Washington, the better to condemn them all.
The better to condemn them all.
Newt – seriously – Newt has a certain sexiness. I know late night comedians call him the Pillsbury Doughboy, but Newt Gringrich has the sexiness of the nihilist.
The better to condemn… them all.
Newt’s appeal… Well, when I read Sullivan’s comment, I immediately thought of all the years I sat in my parents’ living room in Garrett Park (in a house almost directly across the street from the house I now live in) and listened to my aunt and my mother be nihilistic together about politics. They condemned it all – all politicians, all political institutions, all political journalists, all political movements… It was all cynical thieving crap.
They seemed happy to have this nihilistic conversation about the world again and again. There’s something thrillingly clarifying about this philosophy of life, about the rage and disdain it releases…
Yes, there’s even something sexy about it. A man walks onto a stage and snarls at all the Occupy movement people in America: “Take a bath.” “Get a job.” It’s Clint Eastwood: Make my day. And when Eastwood says that, UD says: Hold me back.
“Take a bath.” “Get a job.” People protesting inequality are … they’re stinking layabouts like … well, like most people…
Sarah Palin had a lot of sex appeal with voters; Newt does too, but his is more complex. Deeper. He is the voice of my mother and my aunt. The hope of the nihilists.
… has died – probably by suicide.
Pletz was facing immensities of litigation.
The school filed a civil suit against Pletz in March 2010 alleging that she used more than $2 million in university assets for her personal benefit. Pletz counter-sued, claiming that she had been wrongfully terminated.
In April, a federal grand jury in Kansas City returned a 24-count indictment against Pletz, alleging that she had embezzled more than $1.5 million from the school, engaged in money laundering and falsified tax returns.
Noting that there were reporters in the room, [the judge] read Doyle’s rap sheet into the record, including his convictions for stealing a BMW, posing as a furrier to swipe a woman’s mink coat for “cleaning,” impersonating a Secret Service agent and repeatedly violating probation.
————————————-
Doyle has [also] spent time in prison for stealing a bronze Degas sculpture by posing as a member of an art-collecting family, pilfering books from the art library at the University of Kansas, and filching jewelry from a Tennessee woman.
Excellent, excellent.
But she should be more frugal with A’s.
… offers her latest Garrett Park Bugle reporting.