Remembering Nora Miller.

… the blog Universal Hub, which seems to be all about Boston.

Readers there are linking to, Twittering, and Facebooking UD‘s post on the suicide in Harvard Yard.

It means you want to make an intellectual spectacle of yourself. You have something urgent to say to the world, a final truth, and you want the world to notice you and what you have to say.

Mitchell Heisman has accomplished this, somewhat. Before shooting himself in the head in front of tourists and students in the Yard, he emailed to hundreds of academics a long manuscript titled Suicide Note.

Although Heisman’s suicide was his own, with his own specific miseries and obsessions, he’s given us something broadly valuable in Suicide Note. Suicide is traumatic and mysterious for the rest of us; when someone about to do himself in writes at length about why, we can profit from it.

I’ve only read the last few chapters of Heisman’s note; they contain the core of his convictions.

I rage at the entire cosmos for having no ultimate meaning.

Heisman’s nihilism was acute, extreme. His super-rationalism insisted that in the absence of any obvious, overarching point to human existence, one might as well end things. He describes, quite tellingly, his experience of “reductionist collapses” – moments in his life when all of the emotions, faiths, myths, and attachments we generate to give ourselves pleasure and purpose crash to bits. With “my analytic tendencies,” Heisman explains, “I could take myself apart in some ways, but I could not put myself back together.”

In a desperate reconstitution-experiment, Heisman begins listening to Bach:

Bach bounds me to the earth enough so that I can function as a living human being. Bach is ground from outside of myself that makes up for the nihilistic lack of ground within myself.

The choice of Bach is significant: Heisman seeks order, narrative, feeling, in a disordered, fluctuating, emotionless cosmos, and Bach is the most ordered of composers.

But Bach – a deeply religious man – doesn’t last long. Heisman’s “unadulterated material objectivity” sees the crutch, the lie, in his consort with Bach. “The progress of reason leads to nihilism,” he concludes; “there is no fundamentally rational basis for choosing life over death.”

Heisman’s hypertrophic rationalism allows him no non-rational or even semi- or weakly-rational basis for existence. He is an intellectual fanatic, demanding all or nothing — a fully meaningful world according to strictly rational laws, or forget about it.

Places like universities – locations packed with people invigorated rather than depleted by analytic tendencies – must be unmasked as the contemptibly false consolations that they are. So you travel to the local pinnacle of human thought – Harvard University – and point your gun at both sources of your misfortune: the life of the mind, and your particular mind.

Not long ago, UD almost witnessed a Being Dead incident. She was in her office, typing away at the blog, when a massive something struck the glass doors leading to her deck.

Of course she knew what it was, and she approached the deck grimly. A bird. A bird had flown into her windows.

But this was two birds, two red bellied woodpeckers, and together they’d slammed into the glass and fallen, inches away from one another, under the deck table. (Here’s the table a couple of weeks ago, with my woods’ enormous mushrooms on it.)

So now UD had the questionable privilege of examining beautiful woodpeckers very close up.

They weren’t dead. They lay still, eyes wide, chests aflutter, heads occasionally turning.

In shock. Dying, or trying to recover? They seemed to look right at me, and I thought: “Ugh. Bad enough to be traumatized as you’ve been; now you get to witness inches away the monster whose slightest shadow you fly from.”

I stood there for awhile, staying inside my house, staring at the paralyzed birds, and I thought more thoughts.

If they die, Mr UD will have to dispose of them. I won’t do it.

If they die, I should get the really flashy one stuffed. How difficult is it to get someone to stuff a bird for you? And then… what? You put it on the wall?

I left them there and went back to work. I checked on them every few minutes. Quiet, panting, waiting together for death or recovery.

And then, minutes ago, I wandered over to the windows and they were gone. They’d made it. Flown off.

Manure Central.

… the latest Presidential psychoanalysis, UD reminds you that her own George Washington University houses one of the form’s pioneers. Here’s a LaRouche interview with him.

… is a George Washington University senior who has not seen fit to take any of UD‘s classes. Probably it’s because his aesthetic preferences (Favorite film: Scarface) are a bit fast for UD.

She will pay homage to him anyway here, since he’s a smart guy, a remarkable athlete, and has an unusual personal story.

(UD, as you know if you read her with any regularity, likes to feature students at her university – and at other schools – who seem to her intriguing.)

The Georgetown men’s tennis team hosted the annual Georgetown Classic exhibition tournament this weekend…

GWU senior Yan Levinski emerged as the singles champion, defeating Penn junior Phil Law, 6-2, 6-1 in the title match. Levinski, who defeated Georgetown junior Michael Clarke, 6-0, 6-2 in the semis, did not lose a set in the tournament.

Levinski was born in Ukraine; his father, who went to Australia for graduate school and stayed there, is an engineer in the defense industry.

An Australian tennis page gives us more information about Levinski:

Yan was inspired to play tennis after watching Yevgeny Kafelnikov compete at the Kooyong Classic in Melbourne. He was eight at the time and later admired Marat Safin, because ‘he is really unpredictable and the chicks love him’. A stand-out competitor in Melbourne’s top state grade pennant competition, where in 2006 he represented Kooyong, Yan came to the attention of the wider tennis community at Australian Open 2006, where he reached the round of 16 at the Australian Open juniors… At primary school, he was a grand master at chess and lists among his hobbies driving fast cars… ‘I play tennis like it’s a chess game,’ he says. Yan loves the feel of new balls, new grip and fresh strings. ‘Brand new socks are phenomenal.’

Oh, and by the way. 4.0 GPA, Fall and Spring 2009.

Last week it was the Psych department chair’s triple negative.

This week it’s a dean’s … Well. Couple of things.

She’s responding to a reporter’s question about the man who committed suicide a few days ago on the steps of Memorial Church on Harvard’s quad.

“It’s really sad, it was horrible, and these kinds of incidents affect all of us really negatively,” Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds said in an interview yesterday. “This campus is situated in an urban context, and we can’t control these kinds of things.”

You tell me why there are Little Icks within Little Icks in these statements.

Hawaii’s athletics department had been trying to rely on the $23 million a year it generated from ticket sales, donations, television and marketing, plus an additional $10 million in direct and indirect support from the university. But by this summer, the department had accumulated about $10 million in debt and was adding to that at a rate of $1.5 million to $2 million a year. Over the objections of undergraduate and graduate student organizations, the state board of regents voted in July to impose an athletics fee for the first time.

An article in USA Today features Hawaii, and lots of other universities, soaking their students with athletics fees.

Lots of universities don’t disclose the fees. Why disclose them? You know that if you do, students are likely to vote against raising them. Just sneak them into unitemized tuition bills.

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At the rate they’re going, Hawaii will accumulate $20 million in athletic debt in not too long a time. Students will to have to take care of that.

… completely bann[ed] the use of mobile computing or communication devices in his classrooms, barring extenuating circumstances.

Indeed McGill may be on the way to an institution-wide ban.

The professor cites “multiple studies linking evidence of the use of such devices in the classroom to poor academic performance, greater distraction for users and fellow students, and decreased ability to ‘digest and synthesize’ main points.”

… this week’s elitist whipping boys. I’ve been whipping them. Pretty much everyone’s been whipping them.

There are a few more things to say about Henderson and Peretz, things specific to their membership in university communities. Start with this, from an Atlantic magazine blogger.

I would not have this vast population of people [ – the world’s Muslims – ] presented as smiling egalitarians, characterized by an affinity for peace, love and tickle-fights. I would them presented as problems, brutal and caring, as whole quartiles of humanity tend to be. Bearing that in mind, [Peretz’s] statement “Muslim life is cheap” must be seen not simply as bigoted, but as shockingly stupid. Indeed the precise kind of stupid that hallowed academia exists to disabuse us of.

It’s a simple point, but easily forgotten amid the bigotry of the Peretz remarks. Harvard is the world’s leading university, and, I think, rightly so. When high-profile teachers there go on record, over a long period of time, with gross generalizations, emotional intemperance, and small-minded, in-group, self-regard, they degrade the institution’s intellectual integrity. Worse, they play into the perception that different rules apply to elites, that elites can get away with bad behavior.

On Henderson: Jacob Davies, at Obsidian Wings, has a concise and sensible set of remarks, among them, these responses to Henderson’s fiscal and psychological problems:

Massive debt loads can make you poor whatever your income, and once they’re run up, you don’t get any enjoyment from them. Judging yourself by the standards of wealthy people is a good way to make yourself very unhappy (as is hanging out with wealthy people, often, as many of them didn’t get wealthy by being nice). And you cannot possibly keep up if you try.

I feel bad for the professor for much the same reason I feel bad for anyone who has made a series of bad decisions – that they may have found impossible to avoid making at the time – that have put them in a situation where they are both unhappy and unable to escape the consequences of their actions. I don’t know what advice to offer. But I don’t think avoiding a 4% hike in marginal rates is going to solve his problems.

I’ll add something else, from my perspective as a writer about universities.

Henderson seems a pretty fierce libertarian, complaining, in much of what he has written in response to this dust-up, about the overriding badness of government, and the way it can’t be trusted to do any good with the taxes we give it.

For the sake of moral consistency, Henderson should consider working for private industry. The University of Chicago can give him his enormous salary in part because taxpayers like you and me underwrite non-profit universities. Maybe this is the one and only use of government funds of which Henderson wholly approves; yet I think he owes it to us to explain how he’s able to square being the beneficiary of subsidies with the rest of his social positions.

… his name was among those scheduled to speak at a Harvard event celebrating its Social Studies degree. Now the Harvard Crimson reports that Marty Peretz’s name has been removed from that list. (Background here.)

[A Social Studies] standing committee will report its conclusions today about [accepting an undergraduate research fund in Peretz’s name] in an official statement to Social Studies concentrators and the national press.

The smart and gracious thing for Peretz to do at this point would be to suggest that the research fund be renamed Undergraduate Research Fund in Social Studies. He already has another fund in his name at Harvard. This way, he spares the institution embarrassment.

UD, an NU grad, is quite familiar with the library where, last May, a student was found dead.

The investigation into his cause of death took ages, which seems to me already strange, since it’s not all that difficult or time-consuming to find opioids in people.

When the NU student reporter asked the medical office for details, she was told that “More details [are] not available because the doctor who worked on Tsay’s case is no longer employed there.”

Huh? Does the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office throw out all of a doctor’s files when the doctor leaves?

The report said that the student died of an “accidental opiate overdose.” How do they know it was accidental?

… Zappa gets his statue in the city of UD‘s birth, Baltimore.

UD will try to make a pilgrimage next weekend.

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Update: Extended remarks from Professor Mondo.

The President’s threats to increase the taxes of Americans who make more than $250,000 a year have exposed the ugly underbelly of the shame of a nation: Law professors.

Already, under pressure of budget cuts at the University of California, law professors have gone public with their working conditions ($200,000 to $300,000 a year, tenure, light teaching loads) and argued that the best way to save money would be to lay off, as Kristin Luker points out, “anyone but professors.”

Now, the proposed tax increase has brought more suffering out of the shadows. A University of Chicago law professor with a household income of $400,000 has sketched so powerful a portrait of what John Edwards called The Two Americas that his testimony has been picked up by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman. Krugman quotes from a post about this professor written by Brad DeLong.

[Todd Henderson] knows of one person with 20 times his income. He knows who the really rich are, and they have ten times his income: They have not $450,000 a year. They have $4.5 million a year. And, to him, they are in a different world.

And so he is sad. He and his wife deserve to be successful. And he knows people who are successful. But he is not one of them–widening income inequality over the past generation has excluded him from the rich who truly have money.

Is this America? I’ve searched my library for any account of degradation in this country comparable to what we’re beginning to glimpse in these testimonials. I had to go to Italy — to Danilo Dolci’s 1959 Report from Palermo — to remind myself what Henderson and his family must be undergoing.

I read Krugman’s account of Henderson’s situation to Mr UD. He shook his head. “He’s fallen so low,” he finally said, “he thinks 4.5 million is rich…”

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In a dark and drear room on the quad
Sits a man quite abandoned by God:
“We make half a million
But not a gazillion.
Dear Lord, can you hear me? It’s Todd.”