What bothers me more is that a coach who is responsible for a non-academic activity and for a team that is smaller than most classes at IUPUI would earn more money than most faculty members, and that she would have a contract that allows her to earn three years of pay after the university determines that her services are no longer wanted.

A professor at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis notes the strangeness of a fired basketball coach getting $300,000 in severance (the local newspaper has had to file a complaint with the state for release of records, since IUPUI sees no reason to explain to the world why it has done this). The professor wonders why athletics “loom larger than the central mission of the campus.”

The answer to this is clear: Athletics is the central mission of the campus.

Judith Shklar asked this question in a talk she gave in 1981; and it’s true that when you read about acts of brutal and consequential cruelty it’s hard to resist a feeling of hatred.

Yet when considering the two Rutgers freshmen who secretly filmed a fellow freshman – a gay man – having sex, and then broadcast it all over the internet, and when considering the student’s response to this exposure — he killed himself — the hatred rather rapidly gives way.

In its place is sorrow for him, and contempt for his tormentors. His tormentors’ youth and stupidity created a toxic brew; and UD has no trouble with the thought of both of them reflecting, for a couple of years, from a jail cell, on what they’ve done.

Virtually all good universities generate opinion pieces like this one, by Eve Samborn at Washington University. She begins:

During a class discussion a few weeks ago about existentialist philosophy, my professor informed our class that in the 1950s, every college student in America was reading the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.

She goes on to worry that no comparable figure exists today – a global intellectual posing challenging existential questions, questions discussed inside and outside of the classroom by many students. “[O]ur generation has no revolutionary philosopher to tear down our previously held core beliefs. [O]ur campus shows little interest in finding such a figure.”

One irony here is that her campus enjoyed for many years the presence of William Gass, a remarkable novelist/philosopher (he’s emeritus now) who brilliantly posed the sorts of questions Samborn has in mind. In a 2005 interview, he recalls his teaching days:

[T]hat was one of the nice things about teaching. You get to assign books you love. It’s hard to beat, that kind of life. You’re reading philosophers who are just incredible—they may be creeps [laughs], but it’s wonderful stuff. It’s helpful to you. You learn. It forces you to pay attention to the texts in a way that I think is helpful… Thoreau, for example, … uses the word “margins.” He says, “In my life I like to have wide margins.” Then there’s a sentence about enjoying the sunshine, and meditating, and so forth. Well, he takes all the sounds in the word “margin,” and they just dominate the words that follow. This whole description—from the ms to the ns. And I’m just thinking, My God!, you know. And so: Life is justified.

Gass complains, in the same interview, that philosophy as a discipline has changed in ways that make existential inquiry rare:

In philosophy, there’s been a big shift. Philosophers say that it’s because that’s the way philosophy should be going. But I think it’s because that’s where the money is. Our philosophy department was pretty strong, what was called PNP—philosophy, neurophysiology, psychology. Working again on all kinds of things that interested biologists: artificial intelligence, genetics. And there’s been a shift, generally, in that direction.

UD, at Northwestern in the late ‘seventies, studied Rilke (a big favorite with Gass) with Erich Heller and Sartre with James Edie, and she recalls exactly the sort of intellectual buzz Samborn’s talking about. I’m not sure UD had any very well-formulated core beliefs (the phrase is Samborn’s) but encountering (in Lionel Trilling’s anthology, Literary Criticism) Susan Sontag’s and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s disdain for core beliefs excited her.

Maybe most people in college are careerists; but Samborn speaks for many when she laments the absence of something she’s right to want and expect in college: An atmosphere of sustained and excited and subversive discourse about foundational human questions (And so: Life is justified.). She worries about “what kind of educated people we will become if we have not given sufficient thought to the world.”

Reports on this are ambiguous, as are reports about why the traditional University of South Alabama cheer – SOUTH IN YA MOUTH – has been ruled out of bounds.

The decision was made by South Alabama Director of Athletics Dr. Joel Erdmann, who cited University’s intent to move away from a potentially politically incorrect statement.

Sexually incorrect it may be; but UD doesn’t see any political problem with it.

Students plan to resist. “You can’t truly ban it if it’s something we want to chant,” says one.

One has apparently killed himself there after firing off some shots that seem not to have hit anyone (this is all very preliminary information); the other gunman is apparently still somewhere in the building.

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The Austin Statesman reports that a law professor was shot at by one of the shooters (assuming there are two).

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Only one gunman. Nineteen years old. Seems to have been unable, when it came to it, to kill anyone other than himself.

Yet another article in a student newspaper – this one at Tufts – about professors banning laptops from their classrooms.

What’s a laptop-mad university to do if its professors won’t play along?

How about this? UD is surprised the campus tech brigade hasn’t come up with it yet. It’ll make looking at sixty laptops fun.

Universities will design and distribute paste-ons for the backs of student laptops. Each paste-on will be a large, lifelike image of an engaged and attentive student. Wide-eyed, perky. At the beginning of each class, when students flip open their laptops, the professor will experience a rush of excitement as she’s greeted by a roomful of eager faces.

If the professor can stay focused on the images while teaching, she may be able to as it were tease herself into giving an enthusiastic lecture.

The model here would be men and inflatable sex dolls.

From Culture Kiosque:

The History of Sexuality Volume One by Michel Foucault: An Opera is a work-in-progress adopting the dramatic musical form to stage the major themes and philosophical insights of one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. In this adaption of Foucault´s great work, the philosopher will encounter one student, two rivals, and a sworn enemy — perhaps all of them are ghosts. Nothing less than a grand opera is required to stage the epochal theory of self-emancipation that is Michel Foucault´s unique legacy. The performance will be set against a backdrop drawn from Foucault´s biographical details; including his activism on behalf of prisoners´ rights, and his death from AIDS.

… a economist already featured in these pages, has won a MacArthur.

The greatest contribution of Saez? He helps us understand why Todd Henderson thinks he’s just getting by.

Steven Salzberg, a University of Maryland bioinformatics professor, writes with admirable frankness about the for-profits in Forbes:

… [For-profit universities] offer low-quality, almost worthless degrees. They have virtually no academic standards. They will accept anyone who can pay, and they seem to care primarily about the bottom line. They also haven’t addressed (and virtually never mention) the elephant in the room: many online students are probably cheating to pass their courses, which aren’t very demanding in the first place…

[We should] immediately stop offering government-funded student loans to FPUs. If they really have a better model for higher education, then let them prove it in the free market, without subsidies.

This is Banned Books Week.

This YouTube will do to explain why Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was banned in the United States until 1964.

A dissenting judge called it “a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.”

George Orwell called it “the most important book of the mid-1930s… [Miller is] the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.”

Tropic is always ranked high among the most important novels in English.

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Yet Edmund Wilson was right to say

The tone of the book is undoubtedly low; The Tropic of Cancer, in fact, from the point of view both of its happening[s] and of the language in which they are conveyed, is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I have ever… read… [Yet there] is a strange amenity of temper and style which bathes the whole composition even when it is disgusting or tiresome.

Let’s say that another word for strange amenity of temper is genius; let’s say that what Wilson picked up on and couldn’t help admiring, despite the desperate lowness of Tropic, is the peculiar, exhilarating genius of an original and truth-telling and super-charged sensibility. Miller bathes the composition? How about floods it? He floods the page with life; and the reader, excited by the high-pitch of the low and the high throughout the novel, by some of the world’s most gorgeous writing in service to the grubby, is picked up and pitched along, made to feel the weirdly buoyant complication of existence, the gloriousness and the gruesomeness of experience all at once.

In this all-at-onceness, some sort of deep wisdom seems to inhere. It makes us feel, not merely study, Life.

O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses

Henry, hero of Tropic? No, not Henry. Molly Bloom. Might as well be Henry.

When I had her naked and her little middle elevated by pillow – the little narrow lozenge of her cunt, which had such a slight lining of hair, seeming charming, with her rather slender legs and feet extended and drooping wide. — I used to stroke it and caress it with my tongue — it was so pretty it would make me linger and preoccupy me, so that I almost forgot to do anything else.

Henry? No, not Henry. Uh, Edmund Wilson.

Let’s see… Ah. Henry:

All the men she’s been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

How easy it is to make these dizzied-by-the-whirlpool-of-life moments kitschy. You need the combination of removed control and ecstatic engagement that great modern writers like Miller and Joyce have to avoid that.

The same strange amenity of temper that gives us cartloads of cunts in The Tropic of Cancer also gives us this, and there’s absolutely no contradiction.

Twilight hour. Indian blue, water of glass, trees glistening and liquescent. The rails fall away into the canal at Jaurès. The long caterpillar with lacquered sides dips like a roller coaster. It is not Paris. It is not Coney Island. It is a crepuscular melange of all the cities of Europe and Central America. The railroad yards below me, the tracks black, webby, not ordered by the engineer but cataclysmic in design, like those gaunt fissures in the polar ice which the camera registers in degrees of black.

Artificial Ovary Poem

The only rhyme for ovary
Is Emma, Madame Bovary.

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What name then should we take
To mean oocytian fake?

Fauxvary.

… thriving.

… on its faculty bios: INDICATORS OF ESTEEM. Of which Professor H M Evans has many.

He’s a medical ethicist, and has written papers with intriguing titles like Madness, medicine and creativity in Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

And speaking of wonderful: Here’s a wonderful photo of Professor Evans holding his Advanced Purchase First Class train ticket.

A university professor who alighted his train one stop before his final destination was stunned when he was asked to pay £155 to leave the station.

Martyn Evans was told he would have to pay up after leaving the train at Darlington, near his home, rather than wait until Durham where he works at the university’s philosophy department.

… Station staff said his ticket was invalid because he had left the train too early, and was told he would have to pay some £155 – the price of the same ticket from Birmingham to Darlington.

Ethicists tend to be particularly prickly.

“The whole process made me feel like a wrongdoer from the beginning and that disgusted me more than just the money itself.”

He’s made such a stink, the trains have said okay, forget about the money.

Wisconsin is one of our most proudly pissed states; and within Wisconsin the campus of UW-Stout is a veritable piss park.

In response to the carnage, the university has put serious new restrictions on students and their drink, which has the students (most of them; not the student I quote in my headline) in an uproar…

Last weekend’s incident might quiet them down, though.

Two students got into a shouting match with a third student at a bar. As the third rode away on his bike, the others

assaulted [Bradley] Simon causing him to crash his bicycle into a concrete wall. Simon flew over the handlebars of his bike and struck his head on the wall causing serious head trauma, according to the report.

[The students] then left the scene…

One will go to trial for felony murder, the other for being party to the same.

… dithers.