Qualifications:

1.) Must be a man.

2.) Must have played football for Auburn.

3.) Must be willing to take orders from Bobby Lowder.

… that there are universities where riots and assaults do not occur every weekend.

Here’s my favorite part:

In 1997 … Kaplan executives negotiated a pay package so large that it significantly reduced the bottom line in some years.

For instance, in 2002 the company recorded an expense of $34.5 million associated with the Kaplan compensation plan, an amount equal to the entire higher-education division’s profit that year. By 2010, Kaplan executives had cashed in $291 million of stock options.

… [One Kaplan executive who resigned] received his base salary, which was not disclosed, plus incentives and $46 million from the Kaplan stock option plan. There was also an agreement that if [he] didn’t go to work for a competitor, The Post Co. would pay him an additional $10 million in 2009 and $20 million in November 2011.

From the Taipei Times:

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei assured the public on Tuesday that all its exhibitions followed legal and safety regulations in the wake of a controversial show on Sunday in which sleeping pills were reportedly handed out.

Local artist Su Hui-yu (蘇匯宇) staged a sleepwalking exhibition entitled Stilnox Strolling, in which he appeared to be handing out Stilnox…

Archaeologists at the University of Wales follow the trail of Batty’s Travelling Menageries.

The New York Times reviews David Orr’s book about the experience of really seriously loving poetry. The reviewer notes the universal opiate pull of Philip Larkin’s poetry …

Regular UD readers know that UD was hooked on Larkin decades ago… She likes both of his modes — the timid depressive realist, harshly self-appraising and defensively cynical; and the supremely sensitive lyricist, singing an insinuating cosmos.

Everybody can recite lines from the first mode (They fuck you up, your mum and dad…), but UD prefers the second — which is, in fact, quite druggy, since it’s about evoking haunted, depleted, distorted forms of consciousness… Consciousness trying and trying and failing to assimilate a fugitive, enigmatic world.

Out of a sheaf of life-is-but-a-dream poems by Larkin, look at two: Absences, and Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. Here’s the first:

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

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

A person stands on a beach on a rainy day and ponders the immensity of nothingness that is the earth, a nothingness whose most striking feature is its indifference, in its massive heedless workings, to the absence of the speaker. There are no ships, no shallows – there are no objects at all in this view. And yet there is a world, tirelessly at play in a kind of autistic redundancy. All of the play of the world goes on without me — all of it, and all I’ve got to say for myself is my consciousness of it.

My consciousness of the earth seems in itself a massive thing, though.

After all, it’s the only thing, for me. I may be insignificant like hell, but my human mind is a power, and a power that matters, since the world can’t be said to exist self-consciously, as it were, without my thinking self at work on it, giving it words, meanings, understandings…

The speaker shifts his perspective from the sea to the sky, and here things are even emptier. At least the ocean has a shore, a sandy point of definition, a boundary that offers a shape of some sort; up there, it’s a yet more shoreless day (there’s an echo of even less sure day).

Just as the water is chaotically tumbled by enigmatic forces, so enigmatic (riddled) forces tumble the day into chaos and disintegration. We can trace a certain narrative – of disintegration – by watching clouds which, like evaporating ships, reveal galleries, and then ribbing, and then nothing at all.

The ribbing evokes the body of the speaker as well – his at best skeletal presence in a churning, self-consuming, reconstituting drama.

Now the second poem.

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

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

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

From her travels through Europe with her parents and siblings when she was eight, UD has retained an image eerily similar to this poem’s image. She recalls being in a large empty hotel in the evening. She recalls glancing into its empty dining room – many white clustered curtained tables, weak ceiling lights, a frightening and depressing atmosphere.

I suppose it’s the atmosphere, above all, that UD has retained with such emotional and even visceral clarity – the tense, hopeful, hopeless expectation of that room, its existence as an elaborated space meant to be filled. Forks meant to be lifted sat flat on linens. This place should have been filled with life, with people — not with the fraught waiting-for-something that now permeated it.

I suppose UD sensed the extraction of the human – such absences! – from that room… Maybe it was her first encounter with her irrelevance, even in some horrible sense her invisibility… The startle of nothing – I encountered this phrase in a poem ages ago. I’ve never been able to recall who wrote it. The phrase haunts me.

So in the Royal Station Hotel poem it’s not nature that prompts a sort of lucid dreaming about life as mere dream; it’s culture. The almost-extinguished traces of the human – ashes in the ashtrays – left in the abandoned hotel prompt the poet to feel our exile, our having-been, our occasional presence in the corridors of the world, but mainly our flickering transience in regard to it. We are elsewhere, exiled from fullness of being.

And always we are menaced by death (Waves fold behind villages…).

The poet confers a kind of life on the objects left in the dining room; they, not we, have solidity, agency, existence. The dining-room declares. The lights burn.

Several business schools have approached him, he adds, and asked him to work on ethics courses. He likes that idea; Harvard and Northwestern are in his sights.

… has written an attack, in the Princeton paper, on the domination of formal method over theory and normative work in that department. It has generated an immense number of comments, and has been featured on the Arts & Letters Daily site.

[W]hy choose regions, why travel to places, why learn the language? Politics, after all, fits into grand narratives that can be woven by cross national regressions sitting in [the department’s] basement. Why deal with the vagaries of power when generalizable truths are only a click away? … If asked to produce something “relevant,” political scientists will shrug that this is the job of public policy or journalism. Our job, they will condescendingly argue, is to get tenure at top universities. And when we do, we will hire students who will be shaped in our own image. This decadently self-indulgent world will also self-perpetuate.

Alaska and Hawaii – already among the nation’s friendliest diploma mill states – are set to become the go-to places for the for-profit schools to set up business too.

More and more states, appalled by the scummy, exploitative methods of the for-profit tax siphons, are passing restrictive laws against them (UD‘s proud to say that her home state of Maryland has been one of the first to do this). As the list grows to include almost every state (forget waiting for the federal government to do anything), watch for Hawaii and Alaska to be the two hold-outs, corruption in those states being beyond your ability to imagine it so don’t try.

And watch, therefore, as all of the for-profits rush to those states to set up business — in close proximity to their diploma mill cousins.

The school, ranked 151 and with a 58% graduation rate, just got a gift of $12 million to build a new football training facility!

… is a disturbing event. Universities need to be alert to the possibility of contagion.

A professor at Cal State Fullerton explains his no-laptop policy. You learn when you focus your mind. Pretty obvious.

This professor also complains about… professors.

I’ve been in meetings and watched professors do other things on their laptop, and it is distracting to me. Students are not the only ones who do it.

It’s so rude. You might at least expect professors to know better.

UD‘s buddy Bill Gleason reminds us that the business of pharmaceutical companies paying professors to write books – or to put their names on books written by ghost-writing companies – continues to thrive. (Pharma also has professors put their names on articles largely or entirely written by the same ghost-writing companies.) Like all ghostly things, this one leads a fitful existence; occasionally there’s a reported sighting. But you can’t be sure you’ve seen a ghost until you get documentation, and in this case, people have been trying to get documentation out of the American Psychiatric Association, which published the book…

On May 4, there’ll be a day-long workshop, at the University of Toronto, on the ethics of ghostwriting. David Healy will be there, along with other academics who’ve been willing to go up against powerful and rich vested interests, inside the university and out.

… has long been something like the following: Our eminent, money-generating professors will occasionally behave dishonorably – even in ways that have significant legal, not merely moral, repercussions.

We will deal with these events with Ivy gentility — we will say little or nothing, at least publicly. If we punish, we will not say publicly what that punishment was. We will never issue a public statement admitting that something bad happened on our faculty.

So, whether the event was Andrei Shleifer and Russia, or Lawrence Summers and Andrei Shleifer, or three law professors, plus a Harvard Overseer, and plagiarism, Harvard will deal with it quietly, admitting nothing, doing little (at least little that one can measure) by way of punishment.

If, as is the nature of Faustian bargains, Harvard loses a little of its soul with each of these events, well… The main thing is that Harvard can expect its faculty to be still about these things, to keep quiet, to be discreet.

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

It isn’t always. It was really pissed at Summers and his, er, implausible remarks about his knowledge of his protegé Shleifer’s activities, for instance.

And now, in the notorious case of the Harvard-packed Monitor Group and its relationship to the Gaddafi regime, one Harvard faculty member has decided to say something. Directly to Drew Faust, Harvard’s president. Her reported response to him is telling.

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

“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary,” said Harry Lewis, current Harvard professor and former dean, to the university’s president at a faculty meeting. “Shouldn’t Harvard acknowledge its embarrassment, and might you remind us that when we parlay our status as Harvard professors for personal profit, we can hurt both the university and all of its members? … We can’t keep having these economists go off to foreign countries and fill their pockets and create these huge embarrassments for the university.”

Here, on his blog, is his full statement.

Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her “scold in chief.”

That’s a sweet put-down, no? It implies, first, that Lewis is nothing more than a scold, and that no one, including Drew Faust, would want to join him in being a scold. A scold. Uncool. A finger pointer. A finger shaker. Some sort of uptight hyper-moralist. Because I mean there’s no clear wrongdoing here, moral ambiguity and geopolitical complexity being what it is… Remember what Benjamin Barber said: Everyone gets paid.

And after all, if the only thing you can do is scold, what’s the point? Harvard is only one small weak voice in the wilderness; it has no leverage in the larger world; it’s just a teeny overlooked little thing… When it speaks, no one listens.

Yes, yes, to be sure. Dave Zirin, writing in The Nation, is correct. But he goes on to make a mistake:

We have reached a clear public exhaustion with the injustice of it all and the steady monotony of [big-time university sports] scandals.

Calling athletes modern-day slaves, he insists that they be paid.

But Americans are neither exhausted nor outraged by this injustice. They like big-time university sports just the way they are. So do universities and the NCAA. If the situation were anything near what Zirin thinks it is, Auburn University’s doors would have been forcibly closed years ago.