… a nicely written but somewhat bland and evasive review of a new book about American universities. It’s in the New York Times book review section. Here.

UD wrote about the same book here.

President Knapp’s response to the authors’ call for universities to drop their medical schools, for instance, is rather weak:

Consider, for instance, the proposal that universities divest themselves of medical schools: they are, the authors think, too distracting and costly, if not in dollars, then in their demands on a president’s attention. A tempting suggestion, many a president will agree!

But what an odd suggestion from the pen of authors who lament the self-enclosure of traditional academic disciplines. This is an era, after all, in which some of the most searching inquiry — and most exciting teaching, including the teaching of undergraduates — is taking place precisely at the intersection of medicine and other fields, not just engineering and physics but also fields like anthropology and history. It is a time when some of our most engaged undergraduates are fascinated by fields like global health, which brings medicine and the social and human sciences together in ways more rich and subtle than students of my generation could have imagined. And where are the humanities more alive, right here and now, than in seminars in bioethics that expose undergraduates to searing and quite possibly unanswerable questions about the beginning and end of life?

I mean, maybe — I’m not sure Knapp’s right that this is the hottest deal in the humanities at the moment. But what’s more important is his implicit characterization of medical schools as bursting with intellectuals who want to lead bioethics seminars. Aside from the fact that you typically draw such people not from medical schools but from philosophy and the social sciences (and maybe law), his comment overlooks the fact that med schools are mainly about practicing physicians and empirical research.

Anyway, Knapp doesn’t engage with the authors’ larger point – that major institutional distractions (athletics and professional schools, mainly) and an overvaluation of research over pedagogy, have combined to degrade the essential function of a university: high-level teaching.

A blogger at the Washington Post offers local examples of university presidents getting themselves and their universities in trouble by sitting – and doing nothing – on corporate boards.

… John Casteen III, who has just left the presidency of the University of Virginia, [was] a director of Wachovia Corp. for years, before the North Carolina bank racked up losses of $23.88 billion in 2008 and was forced into a shotgun merger with Wells Fargo National Bank, using taxpayer bailout money.

Wachovia stumbled because it got involved in subprime mortgages, notably by buying Golden West, a subprime mortgage lender. Casteen, who did not respond to questions, was on the board during that takeover and throughout all of the drama when the financial crisis hit in late 2007, spelling doom for Wachovia.

Today, Casteen is a defendant in a massive lawsuit brought on by pension fund managers who say they were cheated by Wachovia. If that weren’t enough, Wachovia has settled with the federal government by paying fines of $160 million for its involvement in the laundering of drug money through Mexican currency exchange houses, something that occurred when Casteen was on the board. In 2007, Casteen’s total compensation amounted to $243,500 from his service on Wachovia’s board and stock ownership…

The writer offers other examples.

… the literary critic, has died.

The New York Times.

… [H]e almost invariably tied what he wrote to a recurring central concern of his: what the English literary critic Lawrence S. Rainey, writing in the London newspaper The Independent, described as “the conflict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.”

For instance, in his best-known book, “The Sense of an Ending,” Mr. Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologically toward some final judgment.

Yet, as he pointed out in “The Genesis of Secrecy,” narratives, just like life, can include details that defy interpretation, like the Man in the Mackintosh who keeps showing up in Joyce’s “Ulysses” …

Our local news radio describes a city under flood warning as the rain pours in this morning.

A moment ago the water let up a little, and I walked my half acre, dragging green-speckled limbs off the lawn and into the woods.

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Rain – the poet’s metaphor for sexual passion, for renewal after spiritual dryness, for letting go.

Also, in its aspect of gray and fog and subdual, just the opposite — life shut in, repression, imperception.

But in a new landscape, a postmodern one, rain seems to mean something else. It plays differently.

As in a poem like The Center for Atmospheric Research by Bin Ramke.

Like Don DeLillo, Ramke notices how pleasantly, and disturbingly, our smooth affluent American lives seem to be arranged for us. Everything’s prettied up, turned into pleasant, managed, mini-experience. Maybe pseudo-experience. In a small moment in The Names, Don DeLillo’s narrator, James Axton, describes heading to bed with his family, “our bodies arranged for dreaming in loose-fitting clothes.” Arranged. Some invisible benevolent life-manager has chosen those clothes carefully for us, has arranged even our unconscious experience for us. Into even our dreams, our most wild and hidden and personal aspect, some sedating, neutralizing stage manager has intruded.

Ramke’s poem — a surreal stroll through a postmodern weatherscape — extends this idea of the managed life, the managed consciousness, closely escorted through a pretty, though unsettlingly shrunken and simulacral world.

The poet is visiting an I.M. Pei designed lab for the study of the weather.

Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.

The elaborately designed building, aligning the mountains (we align them; we bring nature into our design, our arrangement, thereby making nature feel unnatural); the files that fine tune the weather — from the outset, the theme is this DeLilloesque sense of a world entirely tamed and patterned by us.

Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.

And, you know, why not? Who wouldn’t want to live in a climate-controlled universe? Weather always appropriate, soft carefully chosen elevator music in the background… See how far we are from the Romantic notion of weather as the power outside and greater than we, the power that makes a mockery of our efforts to control the world. Now we control – interiorize, in the Center – even the power of weather.

He wants to tell a story but no one would listen,
like opera: Black women clean the floors
and shine the walls like silver nightly.
Computers whir Platonic as nuns. Nothing

escapes naming; storms arranged in teacups
like anyone’s collection, like rows of butterflies
pinned and satisfactory: this is the new landscape.

Let me tell you how being in this place feels to me. The telling will be surreal, and you won’t listen, becalmed inside your own version of climate control. But this weird technological world around me is almost spiritual in its hushed perfection, in the way the setting creates an autonomous and satisfying and ordered world whose power and tranquility make me never want to leave it. Everything is named here, arranged. No mystery, no anxious unknowing.

Also, though, dead. Pinned. The new landscape.

Now, as the poet continues his walk through the atmospheric exhibits, his thoughts take a bizarre turn.

Or there is a lewd father among the shrubbery

watching daughters in weather; he breathes heavily
and the wet wisdom begins, the storm gathering
to spill across the ridge, longed for.
Daughters must be warned against sincerity

of frantic violins: “He was a man of sympathetic
tendencies,” read the official report. “He was
smaller than he looked and tended to lick chocolate
from his fingers in a lascivious manner.”

He tried his wife’s patience, it is true,
and lived alone through the marriage, kept
his own counsel. With such petty symbols as
weather, he kept his own counsel.

So, the poet begins to imagine a narrative, in some way inspired by what he’s seeing, a kind of louche fairy tale in which an infantile voyeur masturbates while watching his own daughters as they stand out in an approaching rainstorm. The storm gathering… longed for… This is a perverse and pathetic endpoint for the sweeping Romantic narrative, the great thunderous sublime which ignited the lovers’ passion. Here bracing weather generates merely wet spill from a childish, solitary, small, and petty man.

A butterfly like weather; the climate like
laughter, the movement of small air. Clouds, too,
have names. Clouds leave home to find themselves.
Good money after bad, the fathers say, and close

the door called Nature against their coming back.
The funny little ways children have of making
the world the color they always wanted. Sunset.
Birds.

Again this theme of our infantile desire to condense and control the world, to shut nature out so that the unclarity and uncontrollability of clouds no longer threatens us. The clouds inside the Center are pseudo-clouds, named, pinned, like the butterflies. Like children, we make the world whatever color we want.

The poem concludes:

The mathematics of memory begin

to swirl like cookie dough, like chocolate with egg
and sugar and vanilla and butter. A bowl to lick,
dangerous with delight, as ultraviolet. Home again!
begs the mother and soon the sorry child walks

that long allée as rain begins to pour. Past
such petty symbols the boy returns through architecture,
a silly gauntlet: the butterfly, the mother, the fit
signatures of loveliness. His parents at the door,

the little cottage in the woods, Hansel home again
at last, the shining path. A little like a dream.
Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem
happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

Like the malsain father, the poet now recalls his similarly infantile childhood – sickly sweet, with much licking of chocolate icing, everything sweet comfort food, like this lab which reduces everything dangerous in the world to sweet comfort food. Indeed the lab’s unnatural infantility has prompted these infantile memories…

But now the poet admonishes himself – or rather his mother admonishes him – to leave the petty indoor weather world, to return to reality, to grow up, to go home.

Sorry to leave it, the child walks home, as “the rain begins to pour.” So this finally feels like reality — this is real rain falling, the real, grown-up, confused, out of control business of being an actual person in the actual world. As he walks back out through the lab, the poet again registers “the fit / signatures of loveliness,” the appropriate, arranged, satisfactory landscape of postmodern dreaming in which he’s been delighting.

And now home again for Hansel, lost but now found, back on the real path… It was all a dream…

Yet note the last two lines (note too that the poem does not rhyme except for this last stanza, which suddenly has exact rhyme):

Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem
happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

Despite its seeming infantility, our new postmodern landscape is not at all simple. It only looks simple, and benign. In fact, the cute little pseudo-rains inside the lab, all those adorably controlled exhibits we enjoy as we stroll by them in the science museum, seduce us into a very perilous ease about things. Outside the pretend rain, under the massive pelting of the actual, we’re shaken awake.

… has an excellent, concise update on the for-profit college scandal. It’s an interview with Jonathan Kaufman, Bloomberg‘s education editor.

Donald Light, a professor of health policy, has given a paper at this year’s meeting of the American Sociological Association, in which he estimates that “85% of new drugs offer few if any new benefits while having the potential to cause serious harm due to toxicity or misuse.”

Reasonable people know that this is likely to be true, though chances are their romance with a particular anti-depressant or an ADHD thing for their kid is still ongoing.

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And how do you keep the love alive despite side effects and enormous cost?

In a beautifully written and very sad opinion piece in the New York Times, Allen Frances pleads with his psychiatry colleagues not to introduce a new category into the next edition of the profession’s influential diagnostic manual:

Suppose your spouse or child died two weeks ago and now you feel sad, take less interest and pleasure in things, have little appetite or energy, can’t sleep well and don’t feel like going to work. In the proposal for the D.S.M. 5, your condition would be diagnosed as a major depressive disorder.

[This represents] a wholesale medicalization of normal emotion, and it would result in the overdiagnosis and overtreatment of people who would do just fine if left alone to grieve with family and friends…

But here’s the real beauty of it:

Because almost everyone recovers from grief, given time and support, this treatment would undoubtedly have the highest placebo response rate in medical history. After recovering while taking a useless pill, people would assume it was the drug that made them better and would be reluctant to stop taking it. Consequently, many normal grievers would stay on a useless medication for the long haul, even though it would likely cause them more harm than good.

Of course if pharmaceutical companies relied only upon this sort of stupidity on our parts, they wouldn’t be the successful enterprises they are. As Light’s paper demonstrates, an entire apparatus of disorder definition, control of the scientific literature, compensation for professors willing to promote new drugs, constant fear-mongering advertising, off-label use, regulator swamping, etc., etc., presses these pills upon us.

Those universities and medical school professors who continue to do their bit to fuck us up should stop.

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UPDATE: The Telegraph discusses the article.

UD has just printed out a copy of Light’s article and is reading it now.

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ANOTHER UPDATE: Citing current examples of global pharma corruption is shooting fish in a barrel, but to give Light’s paper some immediate context:

… [The Department of Justice] is … interested in corrupt payments that may have influenced the reliability or integrity of data in clinical trials performed outside the US. A recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services found 80 per cent of marketing applications for drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the US had relied on at least one foreign trial.

“Companies may find themselves facing critical legal issues if approval of products rested on the results of studies the DoJ deems corrupt,” Arnold & Porter said in an advisory letter to clients last month.

… [L]ast November, Lanny Breuer, head of the DoJ’s criminal division, announced that investigators would be focusing on international corruption in the pharmaceuticals industry for “years”.

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SUPERNOVA: Light’s paper is exploding all over the web. , blogs, people are talking about it.

And why? Because the idiots at New Mexico State University who insisted on joining the expensive Western Athletic Conference six years ago have put the program into a persistent, almost ten million dollar, debt.

NMSU will deal with this by “shift[ing] about $4.1 million annually from education” to athletics.

The NMSU Faculty Senate in March OK’d a resolution asking for administrators to stop subsidizing the athletics budget with Instruction and Administration funds and to incorporate the program’s budgeting process into that of the rest of the university’s. Plus, it asked that student fees only be used to boost athletics, if it’s approved by the student body.

About $2.9 million in student fees – a different pool from Instruction and Administration – is expected to go to athletics in the current year, up from $1.4 million in 2006-07.

Yeah well dream on. Note the bit about only if it’s approved… You wouldn’t want to ask the students if they’d like you to rip them off for more and more sports money every year ’cause they’re going to say no…

From the New York Times obituary for Bernard Knox:

The O.S.S. later sent him into northern Italy for an equally dangerous mission with the Italian underground, and it was there that he rekindled his passion for the classics. Holed up in an abandoned villa, he discovered a bound copy of Virgil and opened it to a section of the first Georgic that begins, “Here right and wrong are reversed; so many wars in the world, so many faces of evil.”

Professor Knox recalled, in “Essays Ancient and Modern,” “These lines, written some 30 years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked, mine-infested fields, the shattered cities and the starving population of that Italy Virgil so loved, the misery of the whole world at war.”

He continued, “As we ran and crawled through the rubble I thought to myself: ‘If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.’ ”

… finds live to be better. Duh.

UD thanks Dennis for the link.

In Israel — a country with a powerful and growing ultra-orthodox population whose anti-Zionism prompts their refusal to educate their children in the country’s national curriculum, even though Israel entirely subsidizes their education — a university president goes after faculty who assign some materials critical of Zionism in their sociology classrooms.

Israel should pay less attention to intellectual diversity in its higher education sector, and more attention to the vast number of anti-Zionists it’s cultivating in the lower grades.

Or no, wait. Leadership.

… is only funny if Lynne Rosenthal is an English professor.

Actually, I don’t think it’d be very funny even if she were, since if you read the details it isn’t about being a scathing schoolmarm. It’s about being a gratuitously unpleasant New Yorker.

You’re supposed to laugh at what ridiculous sticklers English professors are about language. Here’s a woman who so insisted on proper usage in ordering at Starbucks that she managed to get herself dragged out of the place by the cops, haha…

First off, I can’t find an English professor named Lynne Rosenthal. Best I can do is a Faculty Trustee at the University of the Virgin Islands.

Second, her behavior seems to have amounted to an extremely rude refusal (“You’re an asshole.”) to answer questions about how she wanted her food prepared. You don’t need a PhD in English – she claims to have one from Columbia – to walk into Starbucks and call people assholes. A degree from any of the Kaplan campuses would do.

Third, her obnoxiousness, coupled with her eagerness to get her picture in the paper (big smile in front of the Starbucks), suggests a cry for help.

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UPDATE: UD thanks a reader for sending her Rosenthal’s academic affiliation. She’s an English professor at Mercy College, in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

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More on Rosenthal.

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UPDATE: The Economist magazine agrees with UD that it’s a cry for help.

I’m sorry, Ms Rosenthal, but linguistically, your position is stupid hovering just above insanity. Most twenty-first century Americans understand that when ordering quick-take food at a counter, you will often be asked if you want various options. This is not limited to Starbucks. The competent thing to do, bringing all your meta-linguistic skills (the study of which is called “pragmatics”) to bear, is say “no, thanks.” Only someone whose pragmatic skills are severely impaired—some people with autism-spectrum disorders like Asperger’s have trouble with this, for example—lose the plot and insist on a pseudo-logical argument that “a bagel” logically excludes “a bagel with butter”, making the question “would you like anything else?” an affront.

It all reminds UD of one of her earliest exposures to pragmatics, via her parents’ 1962 Beyond the Fringe album.

Jonathan Miller plays an Englishman wistfully recalling his days at Trinity College Cambridge:

One of the advantages of living in Great Court, Trinity, I seem to recall, was the fact that one could pop across at any time of the day or night and trap the then young G.E. Moore into a logical falsehood by means of a cunning semantic subterfuge. I recall one occasion with particular vividness. I had popped across and had knocked upon his door. “Come in”, he said. I decided to wait awhile in order to test the validity of his proposition. “Come in”, he said once again. “Very well”, I replied, “if that is in fact truly what you wish”.

I opened the door accordingly and went in, and there was Moore seated by the fire with a basket upon his knees. “Moore”, I said, “do you have any apples in that basket?” “No”, he replied, and smiled seraphically, as was his wont. I decided to try a different logical tack. “Moore”, I said, “do you then have some apples in that basket?” “No”, he replied, leaving me in a logical cleft stick from which I had but one way out. “Moore”, I said, “do you then have apples in that basket?” “Yes”, he replied. And from that day forth, we remained the very closest of friends.’

Lots of people are speculating about why Harvard’s investment managers have suddenly divested from Israel.

Could be an entirely bottom-line thing, of course. But some suggest that Harvard anticipates Israel invading Iran, and the university doesn’t want its money in an unstable wartime economy.

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

UPDATE: A suggestion that it’s about Israel’s recent upgrading to a developed economy.

Yaacov Heen, Cellcom’s Chief Financial Officer, said the divestment is in response to Israel’s recent reclassification as a developed economy.

… “There are some funds which invest only in emerging markets,” continued Heen, the Cellcom CFO. “So Harvard had to sell our stock because Israel is no longer classified as an emerging market and they no longer have the ability to hold this stock within the emerging markets fund.”

“We have seen a real change in the volume of trade since they reclassified us,” he said. “In the longterm this is good news for us because there is now more money that can be invested in Israel, but in the short-term it means we need to work to find new investors.”

“The problem is that Israel is very small compared to other developed countries so we have to compete on a much higher level,” Heen added. “When we traded against emerging countries it was very easy to compete for investors.”

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ANOTHER UPDATE: The emerging market thing does seem to have been the reason.

Harvard said the change had taken place because Israel had been part of its emerging markets portfolio but the country’s status had been upgraded to developed market.

… seems to UD to combine one of the worst headlines she’s read with one of the worst photos she’s seen.

Bags of Ambition?

And is the foreground of the picture nae but a big plaid butt?

… there was an

… insurrection among [Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser’s] staff… “[When] Marc was in Australia, [said an informed source], the university came in and seized his hard drives and videos because some students in his lab said, ‘Enough is enough.’ They said this was a pattern and they had specific evidence [of research fraud].”

Background here.

Not a peep out of Harvard all this time. They seem to have retracted one of his papers… or gotten him to retract it or something… But otherwise, three years after strong evidence of fraud on the part of one of its highest-profile faculty members, Harvard’s doing and saying nothing. Only because someone at Harvard leaked a letter about it to the press do we know anything.

The cover-up is beginning to look as bad as the scandal.