… about the new president’s salary at the University of Minnesota. But remember: This is the man who will go up before all the peoples of Minnesota and plead for alcohol sales at the university’s new football stadium! On his shoulders alone falls the responsibility of explaining to the politicians of the state the indispensability of beer and wine sales to the health of the state’s flagship. How much does the head lobbyist for the National Beer Wholesalers get? That’s what you’ve got to go by.

From an article in the Boston Globe titled DARK CLOUDS COVER AUBURN:

The buzz across the South, where college football is a religion, is that the [Cam] Newton story, because of its implications, is the biggest story ever in the SEC.

It may evolve into that, since the FBI is interested in the concept of football players being “shopped around’’ to schools.

That raises another question. Right now, Mississippi State is the only school that has been mentioned as a potential bidder — and, again, Mississippi State has not been accused of making an offer or accepting one, only of hearing about one.

But can we really believe in the high-stakes world of the SEC — which has had six of its 12 schools make off-the-field headlines this season, be it for recruiting violations, agent problems, or assorted crimes and misdemeanors — that Mississippi State was the only school in the conference contacted about Newton?

The Mississippi State article is titled: THE CLOUDS GATHER OVER A ONCE-BRIGHT SEASON.

Almost got away with it, too; and I’m sure he’ll be able to swing something like this again. Just needs to lie low a bit. Like Sarah Ferguson.

Les Wyatt, the former [Arkansas State University] president, [is] making $150,000 a year though living in Dallas and not teaching while on paid leave… [He is also] head of an outfit marketing on-line courses for colleges and universities.

….American University System … had listed Wyatt as “president and chairman.” AUS is an on-line education firm that has listed Arkansas State as a client. The listings were removed from the website after reporters asked about them. ASU faculty have raised questions about a possible conflict of interest, since Wyatt is still on the Arkansas State payroll, now as a professor on “compensated leave.”

The listings were removed from the website, and now Wyatt has been removed from Arkansas State’s payroll, faculty there having noted that this is one hell of a knock your socks off conflict of interest.

Plus real universities don’t consider going to Dallas to run your business research leave.

[Faculty concerns about] conflict of interest were brought up when last month it was discovered Dan Howard, interim chancellor of ASUJ, was serving on the board of a subsidiary of [Academic Partnerships, a for-profit company running online courses at ASU], and Les Wyatt, former ASU System president and current ASU professor emeritus of higher education and art history, was found to be serving as president and chairman of American University System, another AP subsidiary.

Fan-fucking-tastic deal for these guys — and for Arkansas State faculty onliners, who get thousands in compensation for generating online courses, and nada for generating off-line:

[F]or each course developed with AP the department chair for that course currently receives $1,000, faculty members developing the course receive $4,500 and departments receive bonus payments of $500.

… Jack Zibluk, professor of journalism and Faculty Senate president-elect, pointed out faculty only receive compensation if they develop online courses. Faculty members developing traditional courses taught in the classroom receive no extra compensation for their work.

The real beauty of this deal – as soon as Howard and Wyatt can wriggle out of the hands of a few faculty malcontents – is that Arkansas State will be a fully online university before you can say Kaplan Test Prep.

… will be named on November 29. While we wait, here’s one of this year’s judges on the sort of thing they’re looking for.

[Christos] Tsiolkas’s Booker-longlisted novel, The Slap, was cited for a passage in which two characters “fucked for ages” …

“It’s very repetitive,” he said, “the sheer laziness of saying ‘they fucked for ages’ is just one example of slack writing.”

“… I have noticed permissible laptop use has dwindled over my past three years in undergraduate education.”

A Seton Hall student, in the school newspaper.

Best comment so far about the yawn heard ’round the world (background here) comes from an Inside Higher Ed comment thread:

Treated like cattle, students will occasionally respond inappropriately.

From the University of Alabama newspaper.

[T]his Thursday, due to the [University of Alabama] football game against Georgia State University, classes are cancelled to accommodate the number of fans who will arrive on campus.

… [T]he University made adjustments to its fall break schedule to accommodate for the loss of class time.

… “I agree with moving [the date of the game] because it will give us extra time to prepare against Auburn,” [one student] said.

… He said he foresees students skipping Friday morning classes because the game will dip into the evening and induce people to celebrate into the night.

Matthew Bailey, a junior majoring in political science, said he is thrilled the scheduling of the game.

“I think it’s great because I have Friday classes off,” he said. “I have a four-day weekend.”

He also said he agrees that many students will ditch class Friday.

It can pull you into a consciousness more intensely than even the most intense stream of consciousness in a novel.

It’s brief, a poem of the sort I have in mind– a sharp and even shocking awakening, for the reader, into the condition of being another human being.

If it’s highly organized, well-wrought as formal art, this sort of poem can stagger you with the way the poet somehow takes unkempt suffering and tugs it as tightly into coherence as the edges of an army recruit’s bed.

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Here’s an example of what I have in mind: Black Mare, by Lynda Hull.

Lynda Hull’s friend Mark Doty wrote about her life and early death, after years of self-destruction, in his memoir, Heaven’s Coast.

Hull took, in life, “a position from which one might understand the vulnerability and porosity of the self, the power of its costuming gestures.” A poem is a costuming gesture, the “transubstantiation of pain into style.”

A lot of art is like that. Art of the sort Hull produced makes life bearable because the fact that the poem has been accomplished at all — given the writer’s sufferings — affirms volition, lucidity, and love.

Go here for her poem, Black Mare, unaccosted by my observations about it.

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Black Mare

[The title, one supposes, refers to a horse… But my mind goes to mare, Italian for sea, and imagines a black watery expanse. Also night-mare — a thing appearing in the blackness of night.]

It snakes behind me, this invisible chain gang—
the aliases, your many faces peopling

that vast hotel, the past.

[The poet summons her memories, all of them housed in the immense and somehow disreputable comings and goings of her thoughts.  She thinks of her thoughts as a chain gang, a set of imprisoned – immovable? uninterpretable? – links.

Her poem already exhibits tight yet not obvious structure; she will use exact rhymes, though not end rhymes, throughout  (vast/past).  Note also the assonance of long A‘s:  snakes/chain/aliases/faces.]

What did we learn?
Every twenty minutes the elevated train,

[A near-rhyme here, learn/train.  Train continues the chain.  Also:  we.  This will be a sort of love poem, addressed – in a mode of wistful inquiry – to the man with whom the poet shared a certain time in her life.]

the world shuddering beyond
the pane.

[Train/pane.  Shuddering adds a suggestion of pain to pane.  Plus, already, we have a sense of world of pain outside the perception of the writer as she was at that time.  She was inside the pane,  where she saw, but didn’t feel, the shuddering world.]

It was never warm enough in winter.

The walls peeled, the color of corsages
ruined in the air. Sweeping the floor,

[warm/color/corsages/floor – Assonance again.  And warm/winter/walls/ruined/sweeping — You see it there too.]

my black wig on the chair.  [Air/chair.] I never meant
to leave you in that hotel [The metaphorical hotel of memory becomes the literal hotel in which the poet lived with her lover.] where the voices

of patrons long gone seemed to echo in the halls,
a scent of spoiled orchids. But this was never

an elegant hotel. The iron fretwork of the El
held each room in a deep corrosive bloom.

[Corsages, orchids, bloom:  All spoiled, ruined, corroded. And yet the flowers convey an odd beauty, the beauty of ruins.]

[Hotel/El/Held]

[And fretwork:  A great choice of word, conveying along with pane, fret.]

This was the bankrupt’s last chance, the place
the gambler waits to learn his black mare’s

leg snapped as she hurtled towards the finish line.

[People in Memory Hotel bet their last dollar on a fragile hope.  Hopeless.]

* * *

How did we live? Your face over my shoulder
was the shade of mahogany in the speckled

[Again the peculiar undeniable intensity at this point of my merging with the poet’s remembering, suffering, arch consciousness.  Its particularity excites me; in its particularity lies the originality of this poem.  This is an accomplished consciousness, in any sense of the word accomplished you would like.  I move more and more deeply into it because its peculiar realization and beauty beckon me.]

mirror bolted to the wall. It was never warm.

[The poem’s organization bases itself upon repeated phrases, motifs:  Here It was never warm.  The cheap hotel was badly heated; but there’s also the writer’s failure to find comfort…  The repeated phrases do two things:  They express the futile circling of the poet’s thoughts as she remembers and tries to learn what her past means.  And the phrases contribute to the musicality of the poem; they are a kind of chorus.]

You arrived through a forest of needles,

the white mist of morphine, names for sleep
that never came.

[She recalls the lover, another addict, like her.  Restless, unable to feel comfort; yet temporarily calmed and warmed and kept from pain by the fog of drugs, they lay abed, gazing out of their dirty windows, into their speckled mirror…  Look at her lovely delicate druggy artistry:  the white mist of morphine…  the white cliffs of Dover…]

My black wig unfurled

across the battered chair. Your arms circled me
when I stood by the window. Downstairs

the clerk who read our palms broke the seal
on another deck of cards. She said you’re my fate,

my sweet annihilating angel, every naked hotel room
I’ve ever checked out of.

[What’ve we got here, a Bob Dylany lilt, coming up from sorrow just slightly for air:

…They stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train
Moving with a simple twist of fate…

He woke up the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere
He told himself he didn’t care pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate.]

There’s nothing

left of that, but even now when night pulls up
like a limousine, sea-blue, and I’m climbing the stairs,

[Spectacular simile, night pulling up like a sea-blue limousine… urban, surreal…  The softness of the word, limousine, liquid, misty, druggy… All alkaloids end in -ine: nicotine, morphine… limousine…]

keys in hand, I’ll reach the landing and
you’re there—the one lesson I never get right.

Trains hurtled by, extinguished somewhere
past the bend of midnight. [Stop the world.  If it doesn’t stop, if it keeps hurtling away, extinguishing itself always like each successive train, each drug hit wearing off, I can’t get hold of it…] The shuddering world.  [It was never warm.]

Your arms around my waist. I never meant to leave.

* * *

Of all that, there’s nothing left but a grid
of shadows the El tracks throw over the street,

the empty lot. Gone, the blistered sills,
voices that rilled across each wall. Gone,

the naked bulb swinging from the ceiling,
that chicanery of light that made your face

a brief eclipse over mine. [What a beautiful and disturbing way to evoke their sex, also a mutual escape, also a synthetic effort – like the drugs – at pain-erasure.] How did we live?
The mare broke down. I was your fate, that

yellow train, the plot of sleet, through dust
crusted on the pane. [The cold, cutting world, glimpsed from within the corrosive bloom, the inverted eden, of that hotel room; seen at a safe drugged remove.] It wasn’t warm enough.

What did we learn? All I have left of you
is this burnt place on my arm. [Needle tracks.] So, I won’t

forget you even when I’m nothing but
small change in the desk clerk’s palm, nothing

but the pawn ticket crumpled in your pocket,
the one you’ll never redeem. Whatever I meant

to say loses itself in the bend of winter
towards extinction, [Extinguished somewhere past the bend of midnight…The poem eerily conveys what it feels like to be unable to experience continuity in one’s life; to have everything appear and then disappear so that you can’t learn any lessons and are constantly buffeted by a cruel world.  The poet is like the character Rhoda, in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.]

this passion of shadows falling

like black orchids through the air. I never meant
to leave you there by the pane, that

terminal hotel, the world shuddering with trains. [The hotel sat alongside a train terminal; but also of course it’s a place of death, where the mare on whom you had placed such hopes collapses, unable to run the race.]

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

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

I’m thoroughly pulled into the bluesy moody musing consciousness of this beautiful poem which has condensed into itself so many of the elements of the speaker’s undoing.

And that is what a really strong poem can do.  It can make an extinguished poet revenant, make her a voice that rills through me.

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

UD thanks the University of Iowa Press for permission to reprint.

… people complain about how much university presidents are paid.

Before they start moaning, they should do some homework. It’s a hard job! And its responsibilities are changing all the time.

More and more university presidents, for instance, are spending more and more time as liquor salesmen.

First at the University of Minnesota, and now at the University of New Mexico, academic leaders spend a lot of time lobbying local governments on behalf of the principle that universities should fix their budgets by encouraging rich people at their sports events to tank up.

Albuquerque’s city council said no, and UNM is really pissed. Its athletics director sent an email to the rich people calling the councilmembers hypocrites, so, you know, the war’s on, and UNM’s president is gearing up to fight this to the finish in court. It’s the principle of the thing! If an American university isn’t allowed to use rich alcoholics to pay off its stadium debts, what’s next? A government ban on Four Loko?

University presidents don’t only set intellectual agendas; they set a certain tone. Imagine a university without drunk people reeling out of stadiums late at night into their cars! The next time you think of complaining about the money university presidents make, think again.

Watch the video. Before the professor explodes, note the conditions under which Ivy League students are learning. Lights low, an enormous lecture class, the professor – his back to the room – straining his neck to read off of a huge, ceiling-high PowerPoint slide about kilobytes.

When American students in classes like these finally realize how thoroughly they’re being ripped off, we’ll start to see massive, coordinated yawns. One hopes.

An award-winning book of cultural theory has its award withdrawn because of plagiarism.

The copied passages came from a book called Cultural Criticism: A Look at Arab Cultural Patterns by the Saudi Arabian author Dr Abdullah al Ghathami, himself one of the 2010 judging panel.

… has to resign when it’s discovered that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation. To add to the fun, he’s a specialist in crime, and regularly pontificates to the nation (Australia) on morality.

But the best part of all is his response to the behavior that cost him his job.

He’s thinks one of his colleagues discovered and reported the plagiarism. He’s not sure which colleague. “[B]ut I have my suspicions.”

And when I find that miscreant, I’ll be sure to report him to the authorities…

… for the SUNY system, you can see why one of its most important campuses has decided to dump degree programs in three languages (French, Russian, and Italian), as well as programs in classics and theater, rather than cut back on sports.

A SUNY professor points out in the local paper that Berkeley and Hofstra, among other schools, have cut back on athletics, and in some cases eliminated certain teams.

As at so many other schools, the state bails out Albany’s deadbeat sports program with millions of dollars every year:

[The] $4.27 million that athletics is receiving from the state [should be] redistributed to cover academic-related expenses.

If those savings do not sufficiently address future academic budgetary needs, athletics should be downsized before eliminating academic programs and compromising the educational mission of the university.

Another professor points out the exquisite uselessness of college sport to the well-being of the college:

[The] bump in applications from successful college sports teams is primarily seen from students who prefer “beer and circus.” They are not serious about their studies and, as a result, add little to the intellectual climate on campus. Likewise, while donations increase, they rarely benefit the university’s academic mission since they usually are targeted toward athletics.

SUNY Albany’s thought or sports decision, brazenly occurring mere months after SUNY Binghamton’s outrageous, expensive, basketball scandal, tells you all you need to know about the disintegration of this university system.

But hey. It’s not as if New York is an important state.

And SUNY Albany, a perennial Party School front-runner, has a reputation to maintain.

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

A SUNY Albany student suggests another cutback:

[E]xercise some sense when admitting students. Stop wasting money on [campus] posters telling me that UA students don’t get drunk every weekend to the point that their brains become an etch-a-sketch. I’ve lived in the student ghetto. I’ve seen your students drunk at 3 a.m. in the middle of the road screaming at the top of their lungs because they think they have the right to walk drunk in a busy road. Your posters are full of lies. Stop admitting students who are going to drink themselves to death and you can save a lot of money in the budget on those stupid posters.

… than an empty, silent, arts center?

Aesthetically eloquent as well.

The beautiful white building, empty and silent.

… has a category, Poseur Alert.

In case he misses this one…