University police say three incoming UCLA football players arrested last week face felony theft charges for allegedly stealing a student’s purse.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s much-quoted remark applies as much to university presidents; and it’s especially striking to see this gesture at public universities.

When Connecticut State University Chancellor David Carter came under fire from legislators last month, the head of CSU’s Board of Trustees issued a memo defending him, saying, among other things, that Carter had trimmed central office staff by nearly a third since his appointment in 2006.

And in fact Carter cut the staff by more than 28 percent as of this fiscal year, according to the legislature’s Office of Fiscal Analysis. But personal services costs for the central office still increased by 14 percent in the same period, fueled in part by double-digit raises for Carter and top members of his staff.

The raises far outpaced the rate of inflation and the growth in pay for faculty and other employees. The largest raises went to Carter, whose annual base salary rose from $247,505 in 2006-2007 to $362,733 two years later, a 46.6 percent increase…

Back in the hot lowlands after a week in the mountains, UD spent today inside writing. At one point in the late afternoon she put on the broad-brimmed hat she got in Savannah, plus shades and bug spray, and watered her front garden. Really soaked it. Stood in the scorch and drenched every blade.

Here’s a poem about heat. It’s by D.A. Powell, a UD favorite. We’ve seen him on this blog before.

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graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds
don’t tell me deluge. don’t tell me heat, too damned much heat

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I find Powell’s mix of out-there, messy, visceral emotion — here, for instance, he does nothing to hide the fact that he’s extremely bitter — with a sophisticated, polished, controlled poetic style, exciting. I’ve never seen anything quite like this particular clash. I really like it. Look:

either the postagestamp-bright inflorescence of wild mustard
or the drab tassel of prairie smoke, waving its dirty garments

either the low breeze through the cracked window
or houseflies and drawn blinds to spare us the calid sun

The first two stanzas give you alternatives – either this or that – but all four images on offer are pretty much the same thing: a hot, horrible, dessicated world. Stuck inside my house, blinds drawn against the heat, I can look at this or that, but existence has shrunk to a dry, small, low, drab, and dirty interior.

Calid is such a weird, rare word; its edgy enigmatic feel somehow contributes to the sense we get throughout the poem that the universe has nothing to do with miniscule unimportant us, that we’re small dry trivial plantlife…

one day commands the next to lie down, to scatter: we’re done
with allegiance, devotion, the malicious idea of what’s eternal

There’s nothing to want in these unlivable desert days. Instead of vibrant continuity from one day to the next, we get a sense that even nature knows how untenable it’s become. Nature commits a kind of diurnal suicide, telling each lurid summer afternoon to vanish, lie down, scatter.

We take nothing from these days – no memories, no experiences, only a conviction that we were wrong to love the earth, to feel part of it. We were wrong to assume we would be in a living world forever.

picture the terrain sunk, return of the inland sea, your spectacle
your metaphor, the scope of this twiggy dominion pulled under

crest and crest, wave and cloud, the thunder blast and burst of swells
this is the sum of us: brief sneezeweed, brief yellow blaze put out

Our arid land was once a vast inland sea, and we can picture that. We can at least generate the sort of refreshment that a metaphor represents… Yet all we’ve really generated with this particular picture is a bitter graphic representation of our thin dry twiggy lives, lives easily, promptly, to be pulled under by those deathwaves.

Yes, this is the sum of us. It’s all we are. “Sneezeweed flowers in late summer or fall. The common name is based on the former use of its dried leaves in making snuff, inhaled to cause sneezing that would supposedly rid the body of evil spirits.” We breathe for a few moments in a weedy world and then get snuffed out. Each of us is a small fire, soon extinguished.

Summer is cruel because it makes all of this visible; it makes us see the paltriness of our being, and the morbid reality of our fate. Next to the stark objectivity of the summer world, our metaphors, which try to dress up the world, make it beautiful and meaningful, give it the eternality of art, are really pathetic.

so little, your departure, one plunk upon the earth’s surface,
one drop to bind the dust, a little mud, a field of mud

the swale gradually submerged, gradually forgotten
and that is all that is to be borne of your empirical trope:

Each death, then — yours, for instance, my metaphor-generating friend — is a miniscule event, a raindrop that merely gives the dust of the world a bit more consistency… And then the poet drifts into an image of his friend’s grave, a small indentation in the earth, a swale, though even this, his grave, is “gradually forgotten.”

So much for the grand empirical fact of your having been here. You’re just one more trope, one more tired theme, one more poetic voice trying with various tricks of the tongue to make yourself and the earth come to life.

first, a congregated light, the brilliance of a meadowland in bloom
and then the image must fail, as we must fail, as we

graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds
don’t tell me deluge. don’t tell me heat, too damned much heat

Specifically, your trope is the trope of every life: the organizing of the disparate parts of a personality into a self (a congregated light), blazing youth (a meadowland in bloom), and then the failure of that image, the failure of that self to sustain itself. We’re both awkward animals at odds with the earth (we unmake and befoul our beds), and we’re graceless also in the sense that we won’t be granted any transcendence of this dirty dry globe.

So really – and now the poet goes from bitterness to anger – really, don’t give out with any more of that metaphor-shit. Earth as a deluge, blah blah… What’s the point of imagining it as being anything other than what it is? No more tired, consoling tropes! You see where the flood trope takes you in any case. And no more whining about the heat. As if, when it breaks, things will be any different.

… Dr. [George H.] Udvarhelyi felt that the well-rounded medical student needed to include art, music and literature in his educational repertoire.

His efforts resulted in the establishment at the Hopkins medical school of the Office of Cultural Affairs in 1977 — the first at a U.S. medical school — which brought prominent actors, musicians, artists and authors to the East Baltimore medical campus.

For years, Dr. Udvarhelyi had argued that after bringing the finest academically qualified students to the medical school, “we kill them,” he said in [a] 1995 article.

“Four years as a medical student, six years as a resident — 10 years they have no time to look at a book again, no time to listen to music,” he said in the 1995 article. “If you don’t give them a little free time to think, to enjoy these things, that is bad.”

As a result, he was able to bring such noted artists as Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Aaron Copland, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Richard Leakey, Leo Steinberg and Phyllis Diller to Turner Auditorium…

Phyllis Diller?

Anyway, read the obituary. He had one of those long, bizarre, multilingual, lives …

… I was 13 when I came to hate the Taliban and knew that someday I would have to fight them. A woman who lived on our street was walking home, with her baby in one arm and her shopping in the other. Her little daughter was close behind, holding on to her mother’s covering. My neighbor was having difficulty walking because of the mud and lifted her burqa for just a moment so she could see better how to cross the road. Taliban members ran up from behind and began to beat her head and back with a long length of thick, metal cable. I watched as she dropped her own baby in the ditch and screamed from the pain…

Khoshal Sadat, New York Times

From a comment thread after an article about the latest University of Florida player arrest:

[Commenter #1] Please point out one program that has [like UF] had 28 players arrested in the past five years. Thanks.

[Commenter #2] [D]id you forget the fact that Georgia had 30 arrests over the 4 year period that UF had 24?

PETER ERLINDER ESCAPES RWANDAN JAIL
ONLY TO BE MUGGED IN ST PAUL

The William Mitchell law professor, freshly released from a Rwandan prison after being charged with minimizing the country’s genocide, has only been back in Minnesota for less than a week. But his luck doesn’t seem to have changed.

According to St. Paul police spokesman Paul Schnell, Erlinder was standing in front of his home Thursday night when one of a group of teenagers across the street came over, flashed a handgun, and demanded money. Erlinder threw some cash on the ground, and the robber grabbed it and ran away…

Texas Tech doesn’t need any more bad news. They’ve already got Mike Leach, Alberto Gonzales, and the Tornado of Ideas sculpture. Plus really drunk nasty tailgaters.

On the other hand, given all its trouble, the school is clearly becoming seasoned in the ways of disaster management. It has, for instance, taken down the web page of Rod Hicks, who has an endowed chair in the health sciences center, very quickly indeed.

It’s now trying to track Rod down, but although “TTUHSC asked Dr. Hicks to come home from Austin yesterday, … instead of coming home when planned he took a different flight. Our sources say the university was unable to locate him Friday.”

The Hicks embarrassment is very postmodern, very high-tech, very much about cutting-edge universities and faculties making use of the latest online teaching equipment.

KCBD reports:

… [Hicks] was instructing students this week from Austin via teleconference. We’re told that when the class ended, he left the video feed open. This is when students on the other side of the feed saw Hicks surfing for sexual material.

… We’ve learned through an open records request that Hicks was removed Thursday from his professorship of the endowed chair.

As of Friday afternoon, federal records do not show criminal charges of any kind but it is our understanding he may face civil and administrative penalties…

So he’s teaching via tv from Austin because whatever… Something better than his classroom in Lubbock is in Austin… It’s a summer class and maybe he’s summering in Austin… All he has to do is interrupt his surfing for an hour or so a couple of times a week to teach this class…

But that’s just the problem! When all of life is switching among screens (Hicks got his PhD online from Capella), it’s easy to forget that sometimes you’re not alone…

A bioethicist at Boston University explains the latest case of disease mongering.

One of the interesting things about this disorder is the diagnostic criteria — one is “deficiency of sexual fantasies.”

Does this mean an insufficient number, or low quality? Or both?

Los Angeles Times.

… The fare dodgers who jump the turnstiles or sneak in through exit barriers on the Paris Métro are as much a fixture of the city as the subway itself.

Those caught without a proper ticket, though, face fines of up to $60. What’s a poor freeloader to do?

The answer, in the land that gave the world the motto “All for one, one for all,” is typically French: Freeloaders banded together to set up what essentially are scofflaw insurance funds, seasoned with a dollop of revolutionary fervor.

For about $8.50 a month, those who join one of these raffish-sounding mutuelles des fraudeurs can rest easy knowing that, if they are busted for refusing to pay to use public transit, the fund will cough up the money for the fine.

… At least six or seven such funds now exist throughout Paris, some based at universities, others organized by arrondissement, or district…

The president of a teachers’ union in Canada announces that because Nipissing is going to give an honorary degree to a conservative politician, his organization will exact revenge by ruining the teaching careers of that university’s graduates.

I’m with Douthat.

Here’s Fish.

The Lexington Herald-Leader notes that Wendell Berry has

express[ed] his displeasure when his university, the one where he both studied and taught, crawls in bed with an industry that blasts mountains apart, fills adjacent valleys with rubble and destroys or pollutes waterways in the pursuit of profit.

UK — indeed, the whole state of Kentucky — endured a few days as the butt of a national joke after the school’s trustees agreed to paste “Wildcat Coal Lodge” on an unnecessary new basketball dormitory in exchange for donation of the $7 million construction cost.

Now, we’re seeing a more serious consequence of the decision to sell the university’s soul — a severing of ties between one of Kentucky’s most esteemed men of letters and the state’s flagship institution of higher education…

He’s taken his brain and gone home. Or in search of a university.

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

“A heartbreaking thing for me.” — Berry talks about his repudiation of UK.

I think this new series in the Atlantic
on tea is going to be a bit twee for UD.

But she is a serious tea drinker, and
some of her readers are too, so let’s
give the guy a chance.

… before we look at what the University of Michigan medical school has just done, let us remind ourselves of the basic truths about Continuing Medical Education. I quote from Marcia Angell:

… In most states doctors are required to take accredited education courses, called continuing medical education (CME), and drug companies contribute roughly half the support for this education, often indirectly through private investor-owned medical-education companies whose only clients are drug companies. CME is supposed to be free of drug-company influence, but incredibly these private educators have been accredited to provide CME by the American Medical Association’s Accreditation Committee for Continuing Medical Education—a case of the fox not only guarding the chicken coop, but living inside it.

… If drug companies and medical educators were really providing education, doctors and academic institutions would pay them for their services. When you take piano lessons, you pay the teacher, not the other way around. But in this case, industry pays the academic institutions and faculty, and even the doctors who take the courses. The companies are simply buying access to medical school faculty and to doctors in training and practice.

… [T]he pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate role in graduate or post-graduate medical education. That should be the responsibility of the profession. In fact, responsibility for its own education is an essential part of the definition of a learned profession.

Simple enough? Fox, chicken coop; lessons wrong way around…

Hokay. Let’s proceed with the announcement from the University of Michigan, reported by the New York Times.

In the latest effort to break up the often cozy relationship between doctors and the medical industry, the University of Michigan Medical School has become the first to decide that it will no longer take any money from drug and device makers to pay for coursework doctors need to renew their medical licenses.

University officials voted to eliminate commercial financing, beginning next January, for postgraduate medical education, a practice that has come under increasing scrutiny from academics, medical associations, ethicists and lawmakers because of the potential to promote products over patient interests.

… [One] leading medical ethicist asserted that the prohibition did not go far enough. Dr. Bernard Lo, lead author of a 2008 Institute of Medicine report on conflicts of interest, said private doctors and academic physicians who are paid to speak for drug companies should be barred from presenting educational material at accredited conferences. “Mouthpieces for their products,” he called them.

… “Industry wouldn’t be paying billions of dollars to do this stuff if it didn’t benefit them,” [another physician said]…

So Michigan boldly leads the way. As other schools attempt to join UM, expect to hear a lot of chickens squawking.