Getting the boys on board at University of South Florida Polytechnic.

How do you get great results like these for your university?

Choose your university’s trustees on the basis of the size of their donation to your governor’s election campaigns.

More than two-thirds of the members of the University of Tennessee board of trustees appointed by the state’s two previous governors made donations to those governors’ campaigns.

An expert in corporate governance – I quote him in this post’s headline – asks: “Are we in an environment that once I have incredible wealth, I need political power? And is the trusteeship becoming that model?”

Crony-stuffing. Fantastic way to keep a university down.

Howard Goodall is asked to list the six best albums ever. Number 2:

Henry Purcell was the finest home-grown composer England produced before Edward Elgar and this definitive set of his choral recordings was made just after I’d left Oxford and Christ Church myself.

It is still unsurpassed as an interpretation, breathtakingly emotional in its delivery and sung like it was the last music ever to be heard on Earth.

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For all of UD‘s Purcell posts, click on this post’s category, Henry Purcell.

Canadian writers are this funny?

Frank Rich talks Harvard.

Talk about Two Americas. Look at “The Social Network” again after seeing “True Grit,” and you’ll see two different civilizations, as far removed from each other in ethos as Silicon Valley and Monument Valley. While “Social Network” fictionalizes Mark Zuckerberg, it mines the truth of an era — from the ability of the powerful and privileged to manipulate the system to the collapse of loyalty as a prized American virtue at the top of that economic pyramid.

In contrast to Mattie’s dictum, no one has to pay for any transgression in the world it depicts. Zuckerberg’s antagonists, Harvard classmates who accuse him of intellectual theft, and his allies, exemplified by a predatory venture capitalist, sometimes seem more entitled and ruthless than he is. The blackest joke in Aaron Sorkin’s priceless script is that Lawrence Summers, a Harvard president who would later moonlight as a hedge fund consultant, might intervene to arbitrate any ethical conflicts. You almost wish Rooster were around to get the job done.

… particularly special.”

This year a group of Washington DC Joyceans is contriving to make it special by doing another reading (they did one on Bloomsday, natch).

The James Joyce Birthday Party, on Wednesday, February 2, 2011, takes place at 5:00 PM, upstairs at Guapo’s Restaurant at 4515 Wisconsin Avenue, NW.

UD will be reading excerpts from Proteus, Sirens, and Penelope.

Courtesy of Professor Angst.

“I honestly don’t think it was any worse than any of my other classes. I’m sure they were browsing Facebook during class, but they did that before with laptops and smartphones. There are a lot of professors who would disagree with me on this,” [Angst] added, “but I believe we’re in a multi-tasking world and we need to figure out how to listen and do these things at the same time.”

Can’t argue with that sort of success.

… the world,” writes George Konrád, in The Melancholy of Rebirth.

Free thought and free speech generally should serve as antidotes to the world, and it’s particularly depressing to see Konrád’s own country, Hungary, screwing up bigtime along these lines lately.  The country’s center-right government has passed a disgusting new press-restriction law.

Miklos Haraszti, former OSCE representative on freedom of the media, denounced an “unprecedented” attack against press freedom aimed at establishing the subordination of the media to the whims of the ruling party and instituting self-censorship among journalists. “It is practically like in Belarus,” he added. “This law is the tip of the iceberg at the ending point of a process whereby the Hungarian government is misusing its legislative majority to methodically dismantle legal balances and constitutional guarantees.”

Protests – online and on the streets (more than 10,000 people showed up at a Budapest rally yesterday) – are taking place.

Garrett Park, Maryland, as you may know, is the town where UD grew up.

Once she grew up, she went away to college and graduate school, lived in various cities, and then, fifteen years ago, bought her own house in the town.

Her latest article in the Garrett Park Bugle has her reminiscing a bit.

Anyway, turns out Sargent Shriver used to go to Holy Cross Church in Garrett Park. UD was at Holy Cross Elementary School (adjacent to the church) recently, to vote; she has also sung at some funerals in the church with fellow Garrett Park singers.

From a letter in today’s Washington Post:

On the day before Palm Sunday in 1964, I was a horse-crazy 12-year-old living in Garrett Park and had ridden my bike to Holy Cross Church for my Easter confession. As I leaned my bike against a wall, I couldn’t believe my eyes: Several people were seated on horses of different sizes, right in the side yard of the church. There was a dad with a handsome, dark horse and a mom with a young child in a cart pulled by a dazzling dun-colored pony, complete with English saddle.

The dad noticed me staring and asked if I would like to ride on the pony. I had never been on a real horse. He helped me up and led me around the yard several times, telling me the pony’s name was Daisy and that she belonged to his daughter, Maria. Thoroughly bedazzled, I have no memory of proceeding on to confession.

When I got home and told my parents this fantastic tale, my dad correctly guessed that my encounter had been with the Shrivers, who attended our church and in those less-congested days often rode their horses.

More leakage.

The New England Journal of Medicine and 13 other research publications may force scientists submitting studies to disclose payments from hedge funds in the wake of insider-trading probes involving a drug-maker and technology companies… Existing rules on payments by drugmakers and device companies don’t cover arrangements with investors…

Until recently, Professor Yves Benhamou was toddling along giving CME lectures, publishing his research, and, allegedly, selling insider information to Human Genome Sciences (he’s been arrested). So we’ve got a third area of disclosure opening up.

Haven’t the journals forgotten about researchers whose articles have been ghostwritten by industry? That’s four.

… a campus, and the campus looks like a subsidized rental unit, something’s wrong.

Scottish professors: Wussies.

Swarthmore’s George Moskos.

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

The University of Michigan goes down the tubes.