The latest in campus security.

In the 234 years since Boswell knocked at Hume’s door, we have moved, if only in the way we talk about it, from death’s centrality to its banality.

Robert Zaretsky talks death and religion.

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And listen – If it’s banal talk about death you want, there’s no better door to knock at than Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

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“Cotsakis, my rival, is no longer among the living.”

“To be so enormous. Then to die.”

… used to be a category on University Diaries. Didn’t it? I think it did. I must have erased it in one of my blog makeovers. Anyway, here are some sentences that made me laugh out loud. They appear in a long New Yorker article by David Brooks about brain experiments and shit like that.

Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They hire a woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. More than half the men say yes. Then they have a man approach college women with the same offer. Virtually zero per cent say yes.

… Don DeLillo, Tom Stoppard, and others, hold a fundraiser for the Belarus Free Theater.

Not only does he reuse exam questions. Professor William Bratton, U Penn law school, writes poorly.

Here’s an email he sent to his students about the reused questions:

Last Monday’s Corporations examination utilized a set of multiple choice questions that I had used previously at Georgetown. I reused the questions in reliance on an understanding I had with the authorities there pursuant to which multiple choice questions from my exams would no longer be posted absent my express permission. It now turns out that, unbeknownst to me, the questions were posted on the Georgetown Law website.

It has come to my attention that the some but not all students who took the exam had access to copies of the questions. Indeed, a group of five students notified Dean Clinton that they had copies of the questions within minutes of the conclusion of the exam. It is clear that other students also saw the questions.

Let’s (No, UD! Let’s NOT.) take a closer look (PLEASE NO.). It’s for your own good. Shush.

And let’s remember. This is not an address to Parliament, a Supreme Court presentation, a last will and testament. This is a simple straightforward note to students.

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Last Monday’s Corporations examination utilized [Never use utilize. Why not, UD? What’s wrong with utilizing utilize? It’s in the effing dictionary… Well, is it pretty? Is it human? Does it sound like the sort of sound a human being, or a machine, would make? Is there a better, simpler, more attractive, more human, less robotic, less pretentious word that would be an equivalent? Hm. Hm. Remember the word use? How is use different from utilize? Oh yeah. It doesn’t allow you to use a big long pretentious word in place of a short non-pretentious word. And if you’re Professor Bratton, you desperately want to be pretentious. Better pretentious than, say, apologetic.] a set of multiple choice questions that I had used previously [that I had used previously. Again, how lovely. And how remarkably L….O….N…G. Loaf and invite yourself to my prose! Take all day! You have nothing better to do with your time than delectate that I had used previously instead of I used.] at Georgetown. I reused the questions in reliance on an understanding I had with the authorities there pursuant to which [Hey, I told the guys at Georgetown to take the questions offline because I’m a busy important person not about to devote ten or so minutes to coming up with new questions…. An understanding with the authorities there … The authorities!] multiple choice questions from my exams would no longer be posted absent my express permission. [Absent my express permission! Off with their heads!] It now turns out that, unbeknownst to me, the questions were posted on the Georgetown Law website. [Unbeknownst, my loyal subjects! Unbeknownst!]

It has come to my attention that the some [Royals don’t revise.] but not all students who took the exam had access to copies of the questions. Indeed, a group of five students notified Dean Clinton that they had copies of the questions within minutes of the conclusion of the exam. It is clear that other students also saw the questions.

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See Part One, here.

Prompted by the recital of part of Matthew Arnold’s poem, The Buried Life, at a memorial event for Richard Holbrooke, I wrote earlier about one way of defining a meaningful life. A meaningful life would be one you’ve made meaningful, in your own way; and one you’ve understood in terms of the coherence of those self-generated meanings.

Although Arnold’s poem begins as the speaker’s plea to his lover to stop, for a time, their fond but empty chatter, and get serious –

Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

– it’s really his own inmost soul the speaker’s after. The rest of the poem traces the poet’s frustrated attempts to unearth his own “hidden self,” his “soul’s subterranean depth,” so that he can know the truth of his being, and thus know the motive and shape of his life.

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But what’s the profit? Philip Larkin poses this question in one of his most famous poems, “Continuing to Live.” So you’ve been able, with stupendous effort, to uproot your deepest self. You finally, as the days wane, perceive who you are, and why your life was the way it was. You’ve illuminated, for yourself, your particular character and fate story. So what?

… [O]nce you have walked the length of your mind, what

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

We’re at the place Wallace Stevens called the palm at the end of the mind, the place you get to when you’ve walked the full length of yourself; or, in Arnold’s metaphor, when you’ve dug down to the very bottom. But you’ve disinterred a purely contingent object, applying only to one man once, and that one dying.

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Richard Rorty thinks Larkin has made a fundamental mistake:

[Larkin’s mistake is to want a] ‘blind impress’ which applie[s] not only to ‘one man once,’ but, rather, to all human beings. Think of finding such an impress as being the discovery of the universal conditions of human existence, the great continuities, the permanent, ahistorical context of human life … [These conditions would be] necessary, essential, telic, constitutive of what it is to be a human. [If they exist, they will] give us a goal, the only possible goal, namely, the full recognition of that very necessity…

Traditional philosophers, Rorty writes, were “going to explain to us the ultimate locus of power, the nature of reality, the conditions of the possibility of experience. They would thereby inform us what we really are, what we are compelled to be by powers not ourselves. [The point of our lives would be] the … self-consciousness of our essence.”

Rorty goes on to say that philosophers in the wake of Nietzsche have seen “self-knowledge as self-creation…. [A] human life [is] triumphant just insofar as it escapes from inherited descriptions of the contingencies of its existence and finds new descriptions.” Larkin’s churlish conclusion, then, derives from his demand that there be universal and established, rather than contingent and new, truths.

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As to the value of those contingent truths to a larger world of human beings, here’s what Alexander Nehamas, writing about the centrality of the experience of beauty for the creation of a self and a life, argues:

[I]ndividuality and distinctiveness presuppose coherence and unity; without them, nothing can stand on its own as an object either of admiration or of contempt. If there are discernable in my aesthetical choices, in what I have found beautiful, in what I have in turn found of beauty in it, in the various groups to which my choices have led me, in what I received from them, and what I in turn had to give them – if my choices both fit with one another and also stand out from the rest, then I have managed to put things together in my own manner and form. I have established, through the things I loved, a new way of looking at the world, and left it richer than I first found it.

Residents of an apartment building on the campus of the University of British Columbia are protesting the university’s plans to build a hospice next door.

They don’t like dying people.

In his remarks at Richard Holbrooke’s memorial ceremony today, the President said this:

Like the country he served, Richard contained complexities. So full of life, he was a man both confident in himself and curious about others, alive to the world around him with a character that is captured in the words of a Matthew Arnold poem that he admired. “But often, in the din of strife, there rises an unspeakable desire after the knowledge of the buried life; a thirst to spend our fire and restless force in tracking our true, original course; a longing to inquire into the mystery of this heart which beats so wild, so deep in us — to know whence our lives come and where they go.”

It’s a curious choice of poem for Holbrooke, a man of incessant action, with little time for the hushed introspection Arnold’s evoking. Holbrooke’s premature death, rather like the death of Tim Russert (“That man worked too hard,” said Ted Koppel.), seems the almost foreordained end of a tense, hard-charging, public life. He spent his fire and restless force tracking the course of wars. Arnold’s poem, titled “The Buried Life,” is about what’s under public life and global events, what lies beneath one’s public persona and activities; it’s about being very quiet and trying very hard to figure out who you, in particular, authentically are.

If, Arnold writes, we can attain “the deep recesses of our breast,” we can perhaps perceive the otherwise “unregarded river of our life,” the silently pulsing deepest reason for our being. (“[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”)   If we can turn fully away from the distractions of social life, to a place where the “eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,” we might be able to see the truth of who we are, the foundational sources of our particular selves, as well as the truth of why we are the way we are, why we are living – have lived – our particular life:

… A man becomes aware of his life’s flow…

And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

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In his memoir, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean takes Arnold’s unregarded river and runs with it. He makes the lines I’ve just quoted from Arnold his book’s epigraph.

Maclean’s entire life, his deepest, buried life, takes place along the shore of a river in Montana; his life consists of him standing on the river’s edges, or wading in, in various fly fishing attitudes, with his brother and his father.

Recognizing that this is his core identity, Maclean spends most of his book regarding intensely, again and again, the ecstasy, grace, and enigma of that true original watercourse, that life-defining setting. He is fully aware of his life’s flow, the way in which everything in his life stems from that river. And so his memoir persistently returns to the river whose backdrop is the hills where his life rose.

We can be more precise about the course of Maclean’s life as he perceives it: All of the bends in his existence have in some important sense been efforts to recapture the purity, clarity, passion, and perfection of that original river, that baptismal, vivacious, blessing. His death – the sea where his life goes – will be the oceanic dissolution of his river.

Maclean’s memoir is beautiful because it is hopeful; and it is hopeful because he has been able to sink inward and see what he was, what he is, and what he will be. He has been able to confer coherence on his life by finding a language and an imagery and a narrative that fully contain it.

We can put this more simply. Maclean has achieved a meaningful life, and that meaning is his own, discovered by him, through the process of living.

… grateful students. Colby College excerpts some emails he received from them in his last days. Here’s one:

I remember making a passing comment about [job] worries to you after class one day. Little did I know that, later that day, my dorm room phone would ring and you would be on the other end.

“Kwedor? Bassett here.” (As if that voice could belong to anyone else!) We had been reading The Old Man and the Sea, and … you told me that the message that I should take from that book was simple: do what you want to do, do what makes you happy. Don’t be like Manolin, doing only what makes others happy; he only regretted that decision later.

That was the first time anyone had so bluntly told me that I could control my own fate, that even if my first job after Colby wasn’t glamorous or prestigious, if I was happy then it was a good decision.

… giggle.

In a recent interview, Christopher Hitchens explains that he almost never watches television, because the spectacle it presents, hour after hour, show after show, is so repellent:

“It’s… the Barry Manilow effect, when you see Barry Manilow and you think, ‘There are people who want to hear this, and they want more of it.’ Clearly there’s something I’ve missed.”

UD has struggled with a variant of the Barry Manilow Effect through all the years of her coverage, on this blog, of academic psychiatry at some of America’s most esteemed (Stanford, Harvard, Minnesota, Brown) universities. Although she recognizes the importance of the subject of campus medical research for any blog calling itself University Diaries, UD is always tempted to avert her eyes from the steaming piles of Conflict of Interest, irresponsibly recruited subjects, non-operating oversight boards, and ineptly designed studies that litter this activity.

And not only are there people who want to sponsor this work – people at the National Institutes of Health – but NIH is taxpayer funded; so, whether or not we like the tune these researchers are singing, we’re compelled by the government to hear more of it.

Which really makes us dupes, doesn’t it? We pay for bad studies that might put dangerous drugs on the market, and then we’re damaged by said drugs… said very expensive drugs…

Hard to think of a more thorough fucking-over than that.

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UD‘s thinking about this because of yet another sordid revelation from the academy…

… just how seriously it takes dangerous drinking.

Lovely way to start the semester at JMU, with a big story in the campus newspaper featuring a psych professor’s latest mug shot, as she’s put away for two years for her second DWI within two years. Great message to send the students: If you’re a professor at JMU, you can just keep doing it.

Currently, Serdikoff is still employed by JMU, according to university spokesman Don Egle.

“The university has a process in place to deal with situations,” Egle said. “If there is conduct that needs to be dealt with, there are policy procedures to deal with that. We are aware of some elements of this ongoing situation.”

Great statement, Don!

“[A]dvisees have been informed she is unavailable this semester, but were not told why.” That’s it! Deal with it nice and directly. Express disapproval; put punishments into place…

Oh, whoops. No. That’s what you do when a student goes to jail for two years because she’s a threat to the community. When it’s a professor, you don’t do anything. You just let the campus reporters check the local court records, scare up her mug shot, and go to town. Well played.

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JMU shows the same aplomb with the local media.

… has been established, in memory of Gabrielle Giffords’ murdered aide, by two graduates of the same university he went to: UC Santa Cruz. The scholarship will fund a “financially needy student committed to a career in public service or social justice.”

… plus incentives.’

Ah the good old days, when a public university – the University of South Florida – decided to dedicate huge sums of scarce money to its first football coach, Jim Leavitt.

So what if Leavitt motivated his players by slapping them around? Drain a university of money to win games; spend millions on bullies who win games.

I mean, it’s just done. It’s just the sort of thing that’s done at American universities:

[USF Coach] Leavitt’s 12-day old apology [for hitting the player] came one day after [University of] Kansas coach Mark Mangino resigned amid an investigation into his treatment of his players, including verbal abuse or having inappropriate physical contact with his players.

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To be sure, sometimes the behavior is so – well – out there that people do complain. Then you have to fire the coach. It wouldn’t do to have the richest, most powerful, highest profile person on campus constantly referred to in the nation’s press as vicious. I mean, somewhere, deep down, you still think of yourself as a university… rather than a bloody scrimmage…

And that’s when the real dollars start flying. You fire, they sue.

“USF agreed to pay Leavitt $2.75 million.” To go away.

The University of South Florida: WE PAY YOU TO BEAT UP OUR STUDENTS.

… in one generation: UD calls that impressive. Hell, inspiring. The university where UD teaches, George Washington University, has just brought this guy onto its faculty. His father was a shepherd.

I also find the guy disarmingly honest. From his Nobel prize autobiography page:

My brothers John Abderhaman and Turhon Allen were born in 1938 and 1944. We were raised in a four room apartment behind my parents’ restaurant in Whiting, Indiana. This small apartment undoubtedly influenced my desire for large expensive homes.