… at the office…
On-site amenities [at a new building across from UD’s office] will include a Citibank branch, Roti Mediterranean Grill, Sweetgreen and Circa. A much-anticipated Whole Foods will open by Sept. 1.
… and at home. (UD reflects on her neighborhood.)
Garrett Park, Maryland, a town near Bethesda, is deceptive, especially if you live, as we do, near the CSX train tracks. From our small house, surrounded by woods, the world looks rural, not suburban. And forget urban.
We’ve got over a half-acre of lawn and trees, on which deer, coyotes, raccoons, owls, and a zillion other animals thrive. This time of year, with the spring blossoms, we can barely see neighboring houses. And because there’s only one through-street in Garrett Park, little traffic passes by our split rail fence and unmanicured lawn.
Yet this sylvan scene has more to do with strategic barriers and bluffs than with reality.
The train tracks themselves represent one such borderland. The end of our land is an abrupt thirty-foot drop into the narrow canyon of the tracks, and on the other side of that canyon, hidden by kudzu and all sorts of other growing things, lies quite-built-up Randolph Hills.
A park jammed with mature trees hides from our house the madly popular Black Market Bistro, which brings lots of cars to the streets of our town. However crowded the restaurant, though, the cars never reach our property.
As for the sound of trains near our house: I grew up in Garrett Park and don’t really hear them.
And anyway, lonely train whistles are echt rural.
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When, a few days ago, my husband and I were shocked out of sleep — out of that particular night’s sleep and out of the larger placidity of Garrett Park — by a big explosion, I assumed something terrible had happened to a train. The tracks vibrated massively in the aftermath of a blast I figured had to do with a catastrophic chemical accident. Afraid of what might have been released into the air, I didn’t throw on clothes and explore. Instead, I waited for sirens, which started up two minutes after the boom. And then I went back to sleep.
The morning’s news about the Randolph Hills house just across the tracks that we’d heard splinter into nothingness was another reminder that to live in Garrett Park is to inhabit a very tenuous tranquility, a shaky small-town life in the midst of the city. The quiet wild greenery of Garrett Park is itself manufactured: It represents the legal and political accomplishment of generations of savvy, feisty townspeople who’ve kept roads closed and trees replenished and McMansions out. They’ve kept our no-home-delivery post office going, an arrangement which means that we take walks and meet our neighbors every day, just the way they do in the boonies.
But the Garrett Park post office is imperiled. Post offices are being closed all over the country.
And ceaseless smart growth near the Grosvenor metro encroaches more and more on the town.
The exploding house across the tracks, then, wasn’t a wake-up call, because everyone here knew, before three AM the other night, that a large noisy world was right out there beyond the barricades. The exploding house was, instead, another of many reminders that small-town Garrett Park, Maryland, while not a fiction, is an increasingly implausible story-line.
UD says: More! More!
I know Goldman Sachs (which owns a big chunk of this lovely industry) is a fatter target, but we’re about universities here at University Diaries, and college stories don’t get any bigger, or more vomit-worthy, than the for-profit college story, with its CEOs taking tens of millions of dollars a year from our tax money and from poor people.
The New York Times and other newspapers have editorialized. But public radio is hitting the hardest, featuring not only a long interview on the Kojo Nnamdi Show about this national scandal, but also an interview with Daniel Golden (UD thanks Dirk for the link) on Fresh Air. A highlight:
I visited homeless shelters where for-profit colleges were seeking students… Often you’re dealing with people whose families do not include college graduates and do not have a lot of sophistication about the system and may just have seen an ad on a website or a late-night television program, called up on a whim and got themselves signed up for federal student loans almost before they knew what happened.
“It is expected that the birds will remain aggressive for approximately the next month,” explains Queen’s University to its students – so look out. They’re going after pedestrians.
When I read this, in a newspaper article about the Queen’s University crows, who’ve already pecked three passersby —
Queen’s faculty and staff in the three buildings backing onto the walkway have a clear view of crows swooping at their colleagues.
— I instantly pictured a (Charles Addams?) New Yorker cartoon in which faculty and staff gather in the room with the best view to watch and laugh.
At the University of Miami, they’ve long had an aggressive hawk problem, which they’ve tried to make cute by naming the area of campus where they peck you Hawk Walk. (They also issue umbrellas to walkers, because hawks – go figure – don’t get aggressive if you’re carrying an umbrella.) UD proposes CROW GO as Queen’s cute name for going the Suzanne Pleshette route.
Born in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, Rajaratnam was educated there at St. Thomas’ Preparatory School before leaving for England, where he studied engineering at the University of Sussex. He came to the U.S. to get his master’s of business administration, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1983.
Two of his Wharton classmates — Anil Kumar, who became a partner at McKinsey & Co., and Rajiv Goel, who was a managing director at Intel — testified against him at the trial, telling jurors how their relationships began at the school and how they turned to crime. Both pleaded guilty and testified for prosecutors.
Found guilty on all counts today.
In Germany, it’s raining plagiarists.
Veronica Sass, daughter of a former premier of Bavaria, has just had her University of Konstanz doctorate taken away.
Karl-Theodor Guttenberg – now he’s blaming his family, and his dissertation chair – Veronica Sass, and pretty soon Silvana Koch-Mehrin.
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Keeping in mind that Guttenberg was Defense Minister, consider his explanation:
Another problem [he said] was with the expectations of his family to master his existing commitments successfully. It had been made clear to him that it would not have been acceptable if the quality of any of his various commitments suffered and that a work once started had to be completed. Furthermore, Guttenberg wrote that he did not want to disappoint his advisor Peter Häberle.
Big strong head of German military! Capitulates to family, dissertation advisor…
He’s now known in the German press as the Self-Defense Minister.
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UD thanks Chris.
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UPDATE: Koch-Mehrin folds ’em.
Y’all know about T. Boone and how he runs Oklahoma State, right?
Well, it’s the same thing with the Koch boys and Florida State; only instead of choosing coaches and shit, they’re running the econ department! Staffing it and everything.
Smaller FSU donors get to write syllabi. BB&T bank “funds a course on ethics and economics in which Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is required reading.”
Controlling interest in courses and departments continues to be available at FSU, but you should probably act fast to get your first choice.
… some people have complained that although when you check in at Lufthansa online “you can choose between Herr/Frau, Dr, Prof, Prof Dr,” you cannot choose Prof Dr Dr.
Prof Dr Dr! A country that loves titles that much is gonna get itself into plagiarism trouble, with everyone scrambling for more Prof Drs. Indeed we’ve already followed Baron Googleberg’s story (it’s still going on). Now another prominent politician, Silvana Koch-Mehrin, is in trouble. Rumor has it the University of Heidelberg is close to taking away her PhD.
This is all moving much faster than Guttenberg’s case did; institutions realize that the people behind this website are finding cases left and right. But the targets of the website’s dissertation-analyses aren’t themselves up to speed. Koch-Mehrin has still made no comment (the story’s been out there for a couple of weeks); like Guttenberg, she’s hoping arrogance and disdain will make it all go away.
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Chris expands on German titles:
Germany is full of politicians who are Prof Dr Dr (sometimes even Prof Dr Dr h.c. mult., to signify that the person holds various honorary doctorates). Another common case is someone who is a medical researcher, as they are often Dr. med. and Dr. rer. nat.). Or people with bi-national degrees. The most prominent, in terms of TV exposure, is Prof. Dr. Dr. Karl Lauterbach, who holds a Dr. med. from the University of Düsseldorf and a D.Sc. from Harvard.
If you like titles, the United States is real shit. We don’t seem to have the same respect for them. I don’t see Donald Trump running off to get a PhD so we’ll call him Prof Dr Dr Trump. And he’s our next president.
We do have Major Major Major Major.
But only Germany has Johann Gambolputty.