… note the caption accompanying this photograph of model Naomi Campbell (currently in a bit of trouble over diamonds she got from Charles Taylor) on her way to her court-mandated community service stint a few years ago.

As ever, Barmak Nassirian says it best. Here his subject is the recent exposure of systemic corruption among for-profit universities; and Jennifer Epstein, reporter for Inside Higher Ed, rightly concludes her long piece updating the for-profit story with his remark:

“If [for-profits] really wanted to seriously enforce any kind of a code of ethics, the whole business model would be upended because the business model here is consumer fraud,” he said. “The margins involved can only be produced if you can shortchange people on the substance of what you purportedly sell, which is education.”

In other words, if they stop lying to hordes of clueless applicants in order to get them to enroll in their school — at which point investors and management at the schools enrich themselves via the federal education loans that attach to said people — if they stop doing this, their very industry collapses. I’ve just described, as Nassirian says, the for-profit business model.

UD loves the way the industry has been, throughout this inevitable congressional exposure, desperately pressing every button in the populist cockpit, hoping to get enough lift not to crash. Here’s a representative of an industry trade group back in June, before the shit hit the fan:

“Elitist Wall Street stock manipulators, rather than higher education experts, have been driving hyperbolic media coverage, creating the impression that outliers are the norm, and insulting millions of hardworking students and graduates in the process. We have every expectation that the GAO, using facts and figures, will provide a full and fair review.”

UD’s been covering the industry for years and she can’t tell you how much of this crap she’s read. Ooh that elitist Harvard with its elitist president — whose salary, around $800,000, compares curiously with the typical salaries of her for-profit peers — from five to ten million dollars a year…

But they’re working hard for the hardworking real people! Why can’t ordinary hardworking American ever catch a break? It’s not insulting for CEO’s to make millions of dollars at the expense of misinformed people who want to better themselves; it’s insulting for the media to cover the story.

… [Harry] Whittington’s work was brought to widespread popular attention by Stephen Jay Gould in his 1989 bestseller Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.

[F]ew would dispute Gould’s observation that, in his description of the Burgess Shales, Whittington had undertaken some of the most elegant technical work ever accomplished in palaeontology. Gould added that if there was a Nobel Prize in the subject, Whittington and his research team should be the first recipients.

… [Whittington’s removal as chair of a department during an administrative shakeup] probably came as something of a relief to [him], who was in any case too modest a man to care much about status.

His official retirement from the [Cambridge] Woodwardian professorship in 1983 made no difference to Whittington’s routine and he continued to put in a steady morning’s work at the Department of Earth Sciences every day until shortly before his death.

Of some 200 published papers, around 50 were published after his retirement, the last in 2009 shortly before his 93rd birthday…

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever,” writes Don DeLillo, in Point Omega. A Guardian writer quotes this line by way of explaining DeLillo’s modernist commitment to difficulty and complexity in his novels. “As a champion of ‘difficulty’, albeit in an American mode, [DeLillo] is an heir of modernism and says that he sees himself as ‘part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce’. …Readers who want neat plots and tidy endings should leave now,” warns the Guardian writer, who goes on to describe a recent afternoon spent interviewing DeLillo in Manhattan.

Like Joyce, DeLillo takes up the stark and daunting task of rendering consciousness as it ceaselessly expresses itself to itself over the length of a human life. But he does this, as his interviewer notes, “in an American mode.” Indeed DeLillo says to him: “When I get a French translation of one of my books that says ‘translated from the American’, I think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.'”

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I don’t know if it’s because I spent a year in England when I was eight, but I’ve always leaned toward the British mode. I think I’m a very American person, but many of the writers I love – Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Larkin, Auden, Hitchens, and now, having read his short essays about dying of ALS, Tony Judt – are British.

Is it possible to distinguish a British mode of essay writing, or, in the case of Eliot and Larkin and Auden, poetry? Is there a British writerly dialect, as it were? A modern one, since we’re talking here about twentieth and twenty-first century British writers?

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In their obituaries for Tony Judt, many people are quoting this line from his New York Review series about his disease:

[T]here I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

I think that sentence, like these from Hitchens about his chemotherapy, displays the British inflection I have in mind:

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Aside from the obvious marks of careful writing both men exhibit — going to the trouble of finding a spectacularly good simile (like a modern-day mummy; like a sugar lump in water); using alliteration as if it were the most natural thing in the world (myopic motionless modern mummy; people poison plug passivity impotence powerlessness); using unusual words and phrases, some of which feel uncomfortably multiple or medieval in meaning (trussed, gravely, myopic, venom sack) — there’s the stoic attitude to be noticed here, a mental position at some distance from the self, watching the self as it suffers, watching it with a grim and wry intelligence whose absolute fidelity to reality and candor gets us as close to what DeLillo calls “the true life” as words are liable to get us.

Although when we are with these men we are

In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

we are nonetheless oddly buoyed by their writing, for it is after all muscular, finely rippled.

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“[The act of writing my first] novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking,” says DeLillo. “That’s really what writing is – an intense form of thought.”

Strong writing is the intensest form of strong thought, and strong thought in a condition of entropy feels to us heroic, cutting edge, thrilling. This is humanity resisting to the last its reduction to an object by powering up subjectivity to a sort of hyper-controlled shriek. “[W]hile the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways,” the en-graved or gravely endangered writer, immobilized, fights that much more fiercely for consciousness, for the words to encompass consciousness.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.

At the point of greatest tension, under the heaviest burden of fear and despair, the writer, with courage, gathers his wits about him and continues, even now, to get the better of words.

“I get satisfaction out of understanding what I’m going through, which I can only achieve by describing it with an almost externalised dispassion,” said Tony Judt. “It makes me feel like I’m not dead yet.”

… when funding university sports.

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Here’s an article along the same lines, about the University of Virginia.

… Bad publicity about the program also hurt, including football player arrests, basketball players leaving school, and the UVA lacrosse murder. [The athletics director] says the department is hoping to teach student athletes leadership skills to help avoid trouble off the field.

… at the University of Oregon, comments on the new, astoundingly expensive student athlete center there:

… The Jaqua Center, dubbed the “jock box” by critics, has spurred controversy because of its opulence and exclusivity. Although it sits at a prominent entrance to campus, most of the building is off limits to non-athletes.

“Forty million dollars buys a lot of new faculty, reduced class sizes, better facilities for the rest of campus,” UO senate president Nathan Tublitz said. “It is a travesty to spend so much money for the benefit of such a small subset of students who already receive enormous perks.”…

The university didn’t spend the money; Phil Knight of Nike did. Implicit in Nathan’s comment, though, is the point that this does not matter. Choices were made about how to spend immense sums of money on an important public university suffering from serious budget cutbacks.

A university spokesman says what they always say under circumstances like these: Universities have no sway over donors. If they want to donate only for athletics, what can we do?

Nonsense. Universities can turn down gifts. They can attempt to alter, expand, and differentiate, gifts… Where, after all, is UO’s president in stories like this? Did he attempt convey to Knight the symbolic significance of a serious university spending this sort of money on athletes, many of whom will not graduate?

… comes out swinging on the Huffington Post, and then mixes it up with readers in his article’s comment thread. Very heady stuff.

His attack on for-profit universities is sharp and angry. He’s angry not only because these schools rip off students and taxpayers; he’s especially angry because their ethos has infected a lot of non-profit schools.

… Senator Harkin and the GAO’s work has exposed once and for all how utterly corrupt these for-profit “universities” and “colleges” really are.

At a time when the faculties of public colleges and universities are being told by their administrators how they should imitate the for-profits like the “University” of Phoenix because they represent some sort of idealized “private sector” efficiency model, Senator Harkin’s and the GAO’s revelations are all the more stunning. In California, the community college brass recently tried to ram through a transfer of credit deal with Kaplan as a way to stretch its budget. Luckily, the faculty senate refused to go along.

Sure, his sarcastic quotation marks should go; but his anger seems to UD justified. For years she’s chronicled the onlining and general cheapening of American university education, but there’s no stronger argument against the degradation of our degrees than a good look at the burgeoning, squalid for-profit sector. Aggressive recruitment of tons of students in order to make lots of money from them; overwhelmingly online offerings taught to people whose identity you cannot even verify; low standards of instruction and little expectation of serious work; not even an effort to offer face-to-face classroom instruction; the replacement of the higher thought implicit in the phrase higher education with information-bullets — we have seen the future, and it is us.

… everybody’s talking about Ubud, Bali.

UD and La Kid lived there for most of the summer of 2000. Here’s a link to UD‘s Bali journal.

Doug Fields said this last May when he resigned as president of the University of New Mexico faculty senate. He, like many other UNM professors, was protesting the wretched management of the university by its president, David Schmidly (long history here).

And he meant that thing about leaving. This article describes graduate students taking over much of the teaching, especially in math and physics, which have recently lost 25 professors “to higher salaries at other universities,” says the deputy provost. He doesn’t mention the no-confidence vote against Schmidly, the many sports scandals over which he has presided, his effort to give his son a high-paying job at UNM, etc., etc.

Several classes are being canceled as well.

Although it’s hard to confirm this from where UD‘s sitting, it does look as though an exodus of UNM faculty is underway. They’ve still got Mike Locksley, though.

… Book.

Bioluminescence work on the side of 1200 U-Hauls.

A New York Times article describes the way senators fund vanity institutes with money from corporations which have an interest in legislation over which particular senators have influence.

“The simple fact is these things should not be named after people when they are in office.” said Norman J. Ornstein, an expert in campaign finance at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, a conservative-leaning research group. “We all know what is going on here: the donors are trying to influence the lawmakers.”

UD leaves tomorrow for her house in upstate New York. I’m not kidding when I tell you that this house is back of beyond. No internet connection, for instance.

I will therefore probably post every other day. Maybe more often, but probably around every other day.

Means of connection: Mr UD and I will drive down a series of steep dirt roads to a hot spot in Cobleskill, the closest town.

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Meanwhile, as we say farewell to Garrett Park, here’s a poem about what we’re leaving. A poem about a typical morning around these parts, late summer.

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AUGUST, ‘THESDA

Morning starts with the sound of a train.
I open my bedside laptop to see
If, after last night’s stupendous rain,
We’ve been reconnected to electricity.

Yes! New comments, new mail…
I glance beyond the sliding doors
To gauge how badly the gale
Has shaken the trees. More
Branches, limbs, and twigs to gather.

I sigh, get up, let out the dog, and go
To the kitchen to microwave a rather
Agèd cup of tea, and also
A plate of olive oil.
I toast tandoori naan
And dip it, soft and hot, into the oil.

Now I catch sight of a white-spotted fawn
Which stares at me and seems to linger.

I give it the finger.

… and mathematics.

Links here.

Since UD‘s very interested in – and about to teach a course in – beauty, she’ll have more to say about this film later today. She has to think about it. And of course she’s not going to be able to see it in the near future…

(click on the image
for a larger view)