… where the university went. Where the university’s president went. Where everybody went.

Not merely because she’s learned a lot from his scholarly work, but because of his attack, last year, on “the arrogance, self-indulgence, and recklessness” of Harvard’s managers as they speculated away massive amounts of its endowment.

Now, via James, a reader, she sees she has a third reason to admire Higgonet. He writes in today’s Harvard Crimson:

… [The French have a] highly communitarian definition of what citizenship should be… [P]ublic space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist space where citizens interact. From a French perspective, refusing to show your face in a public space is a refusal not just of custom, but of interactive citizenship.

… In my head and in my heart, full as it is with the memories of a French childhood, I do so dislike the burka that outlawing it in France seems to me to be more or less acceptable, even if that should not be the case in the United States. It has no place in French life and history, and outlawing the burka might well have been one of the very few items of public policy on which Robespierre and Marie-Antoinette, or Joan of Arc and the Marquis de Sade, would have readily agreed.

Wanting to wear the burka seems to me to be a self-inflicted wound that I just can’t accept. In this symbolic matter, the French tradition seems to me to be for France, at least, the more plausible alternative: for France, and eventually, for all women everywhere…

Peter Popham, in Prospect, shares his disgust at the dumps Italy has let Pompeii and Herculaneum become.

Both sites are located in areas notorious for organised crime, with rackets run by the Camorra, the Naples mafia, within spitting distance of the front gates. The port of Ercolano, the suburb of Naples in which Herculaneum sits, is said to be a focal point for the Camorra-run drugs trade. Up until the 19th century, Ercolano was a seaside resort for grandees, but today the old villas are hemmed in by squalor. Gang shootings are common on the streets.

UD is grateful that she and her mother (who studied with Wilhelmina Jashemski, an expert on Pompeii’s gardens) visited Pompeii thirty years ago, before it became derelict.

UD‘s been archaeologically lucky. When she was a kid, she visited the original Lascaux Caves. Later that year, they were permanently closed to the public. (Cool website here.)

… with plans to demolish them and put campus parking and landscaping in their place.

Some locals aren’t happy. One comments:

Sad news about the buildings. There are plenty of other pubs in the vicinity, though, which is some comfort to alcoholics like me.

What happens to women who might just be habituated to covering up? Will there be any help for them if they experience agoraphobia and panic?

An Australian writer worries about what will happen to a class of women who have been so smothered all their lives that the very act of being in the world of humanity will cause them to need mental health treatment.

I mean, I see her point. Far kinder to keep them covered up.

From Sol Gittleman’s commencement speech to this year’s graduates of Tufts University:

… We never thought that those 34 or 40 courses actually provided you with all the wisdom that you needed. For most of you, we really didn’t even prepare you for a specific job. We prepared you for a life of risk, change, and the capacity to think, grow, learn, and be happy; to discover what it is that gives you satisfaction. You weren’t educated at Tufts for your first employment; you were educated for your last one; so, don’t worry about the first job. The one you’ll have in three years hasn’t even been invented yet! You may have several different careers. Many of you have already changed majors in college. One of you came as a pre-med student, and she is leaving to become an Episcopalian priest! Some of you have found your passion, others have not, yet. And that’s the uniqueness of American higher education; it provides ample room for changing directions, for exploring, even in the worst of economic times, for creating your own world of happiness and satisfaction. Don’t get impatient. It may not happen tomorrow. But, you are uniquely equipped to deal with a changing world.

… The technological advances of these next fifty years could alter how your generation understands the meaning of a library. But, don’t ever forget the human component of sharing space with books and other people.

… You discovered [here] the utter satisfaction of reading good literature, a novel, a story, or a poem, of sitting under a tree on this hill and reading Proust, or going to the Balch Theatre or Granoff for Cole Porter or Henry Purcell. Hold on to it. Never be embarrassed by your love of beauty or art.

… We’ll know in about forty years if we did a decent job in preparing you for your lives. If you continue to get better at everything you do, if you can take risks, change directions, remain intellectually flexible and engaged in the world around you, if you can discover a modest degree of happiness regardless of your income, then we will take some credit for lighting the candle of your mind.

Now, the conclusion, with thanks to Hamlet and Shakespeare’s old Polonius, the advice giver:

Start your own motor. Don’t wait for anyone to tell you what to do.

Believe that your tank is always half full, never half empty.

Work hard at whatever you do, whatever you believe in.

You can accomplish what you want to without ever having to hurt someone else. Be competitive, but never lose sight of the rest of humanity. Be civil in all your arguments and struggles, and demand civility from others.

Remember the past: keep looking backward, so that looking forward makes some sense out of it.

Expect nothing. Blame no one. Do something. And don’t whine.

Keep your memos short; watch your grammar, proofread, and spelling still counts.

Leadership is bogus.  You know it.  I know it.

No, no.  Not actually leading people.  Leading people is great.  Churchill, etc.  That’s great.

Teaching leadership is bogus.  It’s done in a million different ways.  Mainly it’s psychobabble for big boys in beauteous locales.

And it’s really, really, really, reallllllly lucrative.  Like, read The Economist magazine and you’ll see these two-page amazing ads for Give us thirty thousand dollars for three days in Majorca and we’ll send you back a leader … And you think huh?  What dumbshit corporation pays for that?

But okay.  I mean, Goldman Sachs makes all kinds of money, and they’re a private firm, so okay.

[Update:  Marilyn, a reader, points out that Goldman is publicly held.]

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When the federal government’s paying for it, though, it’s a little annoying, isn’t it?  Isn’t it just a slight piss-off to realize that your taxes are paying for…

Well, let’s get precise, shall we?  How much does the federal government ask us to pay in order to turn some of its higher ranking civil  servants into (drum roll) leaders?

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As always, Senator Grassley, head of the Where Do Your Taxes Go committee, has been looking into the matter. He is rather staggered by what he has found.  He has written some letters to people who run organizations that charge the federal government for leadership seminars.  He has asked them to explain their charges.  Here are some of those organizations.

The Center for Creative Leadership doesn’t just have a great name.  It’s located on ONE LEADERSHIP PLACE, Greensboro, North Carolina.  Its street is a leader. This alone perhaps warrants a certain premium for leadership trainees who, even as their rented cars pull up to CCL headquarters, can sense that the very ground upon which they motor is imbued with leadership.

A five-day leadership course at the CCL will cost you between $6200 and $10,600.

This puts those three-day Harvard alumni boat trips down the Nile to shame, kiddies.

And speaking of Harvard, let’s look at what the Kennedy School is charging these days for their Senior Executive whatever — all of it paid by the government.  The school has just raised the tuition.  It now costs almost $20,000 for four weeks of what must be one HELL of a leadership initiation.  Some really amazing shit must be going down, like say very ancient and secret mystical leadership rituals.  We’ll see.

The costs for this and similar four-week courses offered by other outfits the Office of Personnel Management uses are 460% higher than all costs for one month at an average private American university.

Public university?  1000% greater.

Senator Grassley has some questions for the Office of Personnel Management.  He notes the expansion of online university courses of all sorts and wonders why at least some portion of OPM-sponsored leadership training couldn’t get done more cheaply that way.  (As you know, UD reviles distance education, but given the largely bogus content of leadership studies, this technology would work beautifully.)  He also, of course, wants to know, as do we all, just what these people are learning.

… has it that the equilibrium of an image will tend to fluctuate until dissipation sets in — unless the image is firmly held.

The validity of Einstein’s argument has once again been demonstrated — in the very history of the image of Einstein himself.

Hebrew University owns the rights to the use of Einstein’s image, and it has just sued General Motors for turning the physicist into a boy toy (image here – looks like Sam Elliott!) for an SUV ad.

Must be a limerick in here.

Some American universities are being compromised by medical school professors illegally selling pain-killers. It’s a growth industry – universities can expect more cases of faculty or affiliated faculty involved in pill mills.

Some faculty members have formal affiliations with the mills; others, like Leonard Hudson, commit prescription fraud for personal reasons.

Hudson, who for years at the University of Washington taught a course called The Human Face of Medicine, looked online for prostitutes and found one he liked. In exchange for sex, he prescribed immense amounts of opiates for her (she’s an addict).

Pill mills are a very big national story (though Florida is The Pill Mill State). University Diaries will only cover pill mills when they involve universities.

… later this summer. She’ll meet up with Mr UD after he gives a paper there, and they’ll stay in the mountains for awhile.

UD will also make a little pilgrimage to American Fork, where her graduate school mentor, Wayne Booth, was born.

She’s reminded to mention this because Utah’s in the news this morning. The NCAA has finally decided that two semi diploma mills that give diplomas to high school flunkies recruited by Division I universities don’t any longer make the cut.

That leaves about twenty other semi diploma mills catering to recruits.

Or rather twenty-two. The NCAA’s decision represents a business opportunity.

The NCAA said Tuesday it no longer will allow teenagers to use online high school course credit from BYU to beef up their grades in key classes. The NCAA also announced it won’t recognize transcripts from the American School correspondence program in Illinois.

The move is part of new NCAA rules that require “regular access and interaction” between teachers and students in the 16 core courses required to establish initial eligibility for new college athletes.

The changes don’t affect NCAA Division II schools, but a panel representing them will reconsider the measure in June.

I’m sure those Division II schools will be along any moment now.

The NCAA in its announcement framed the prohibition as part of a larger effort to clamp down on online or mailed-correspondence courses taken by athletes. But for the moment, the NCAA is only banning online courses from BYU and one other institution, the Illinois-based American School.

The NCAA, in the press release on its website, said BYU and American School were “two of the programs most frequently submitted to the NCAA Eligibility Center.”

… Students trying to get or stay eligible to play sports at the University of Kansas, University of Mississippi and Nicholls State University …have been found to have improperly taken BYU correspondence courses. In the case of Nicholls State, some athletes didn’t know coaches enrolled them in the BYU courses.

Can there by any more pitiful sports program than Nicholls State? It cheats to get its guys on campus, and then no one comes to its games…

… seem to be happening again…

Yes, it’s the same old same old here at University Diaries, where valedictorians who plagiarize their commencement speeches are as common as … well, as common as loyal alumni who donate stolen money to their school.

These are both Ivy League stories, which is the only reason they’ve risen to the level of national news. It may turn out to be more or less amusing to see whether Yale returns the money, or whether Columbia will explain why its class valedictorian is unable to write a short speech by himself. But if you’ve been a faithful companion to me on my Blog Journey, you know these are retreads.

… has a couple of poems in this month’s Poetry Magazine.

Here’s one of them, and it’s a fine example of what a modern lyric poem can do as it snakes through the thoughts of a person observing a particular scene, and observing himself responding in certain ways to the scene…

But like all good poems, it’s also linguistically interesting. In this case, look at how Hudgins playfully repeats a strong G sound.

I mean, yes, it’s playful; the writer’s having fun with language. Yet as we begin to discern his theme, the Guh, Guh, Guh thing he’s got going begins to look, er, grave.

For the poem unsullied by UD‘s blue-colored commentary, click on the link at the beginning of this post.

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Grand Expensive Vista

[On first reading, we think this is Grand Expansive Vista. But no.]

As we sipped and mingled,
regaled
with oldfangled
canapés and beguiled,
or entertained at least, by gargled
oldies, I disengaged

[So the speaker’s at a party it seems, standing around drinking, and nibbling canapés.  The narrative begins right away:  He breaks from the gathering, disengages…]

and angled
across grass tenderly groomed,
past where electric tiki torches gleamed,
and, alone, gazed,
now truly beguiled,
at my hosts’ grand
expensive vista, mortgaged,
yes, and, yes, remortgaged.

[His friend has gone into debt in order to buy the view at which the speaker now marvels.  There’s nothing wild here; the grass is “tenderly groomed,” and one can assume the view too is just so…   I mean, it’s telling that the speaker’s first response to the view is to consider how expensive it must have been to get visual access to it.]

A low gold
moon glowed
against a plush black sky gauzed,
even filigreed,
with stars. Gowned
in old-growth oaks glazed
with moonlight over their autumn gilt,
the hills glowed
in concord with the golden moon.

[This description of nature isn’t exactly Coleridge.  The words – plush, gowned, gilt – suggest something bought, fashioned, groomed, humanly bejeweled.   There’s something a little too organized, something a little stagey,  in the “concord” of the hills with the moon.]

I lingered,
glad—discomfited and glad—
at what my friends’ greed
for beauty afforded me.

[Having done his description, the poet now turns to his consciousness.  How does this scene make him feel?  What does it make him think about?  Well, it’s complicated.  He’s both happy and uncomfortable.  Who could be unhappy at having the good fortune to be present at such a glowing night scene, such glorious earthly concord?  Yet we don’t find the poet in accord at all; he’s unsettled.  He doesn’t mince words:  This exquisite scene is a product of “my friends’ greed.”  Greed for beauty, to be sure.  But nonetheless greed.]

I argued,
self against self, what they’d gained
and lost, and me with them, entangled
as friendship entangles.

[Wrestling with himself now, the speaker goes back and forth on the perennial question of human grasping.  Does the fact that his friends have been greedy for the sake of beauty make them less unpalatable from a moral standpoint?  And what of the speaker’s own collusion in this greed?  He, after all, is their friend, and seems a willing beneficiary of their greediness.]

I nearly groaned
aloud with want before my friend grabbed
my elbow.

[I want this! Forget the moral crap, says the speaker.  I share the same infantile grasping for goodies that my friends have!  I want!  I want!]

“Gorgeous, eh?” I grinned
and agreed,
my voice greased
with hidden envy.

[Pretty little poem, eh?  Greed.  Envy.  This beautiful view seems to take one quite far from concord.]

From behind us, grilled
sirloin, pedigreed

[Greed and pedigreed.  Clever.]

meat sublimating on embers,

[A nice way of capturing in an image his smooth exterior sublimating – my voice greased – what is actually burning envy.]

triggered
another hunger.

[Yum.  The carnivore’s mouth waters at the aroma... We’ve been animals all along in this poem, going Guh, Guh, Guh…]

Life was not just good,
but too good:

[So here, as the poem ends, we get the moral kick.  It’s discomfiting to be in a world too rich.  By capturing, purchasing, and grooming the world, we make beautiful things kind of ugly.]

aged beef, aged wine after bourbon. We hungered,
and all the way back to his engorged
glass table, hunger was our guide.

[Read Wallace Shawn’s brilliant little book, The Fever. This poem shares with that book an interest in the way the glowing gold gauzy glaze of our greedy-for-beauty world diminishes us.]

This excerpt from Don DeLillo’s White Noise…

No, it’s from the Hartford Advocate, sent to UD by chris, a reader, and it’s an actual statement from an actual Trinity College student in which she notes that her efforts to focus on the murder of six million Jews are sometimes interrupted by previews of coming attractions.

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A history professor at Trinity says, “The laptop isolates you from your classmates. Your relationship in the class is no longer as part of a community.”

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The laptop works kind of like a burqa.

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Another Trinity professor also thinks laptops discourage discussion.

If you make a comment in class, you are very aware that others are paying attention to you. As a professor, I’ve accepted the fact that some people aren’t paying attention to me. But when a student takes a risk, it is important that they are taken seriously. If the other eyes are on a laptop, contributors are aware that people are not engaged with what they are saying.

It’s a subtle and important point. Let’s consider it more closely.

Offering comments in university classrooms takes a bit of nerve, because smart people in those rooms are taking what you say seriously.

But of course that’s exactly why you want to say things in a serious university classroom. The setting forces you to focus and reflect before you speak; the mere mental formulation of your idea or your objection or your question, the very preparation to speak, is a kind of education in honing your language, refining your point, thinking seriously.

Again, this is because you know that serious people are going to listen to you carefully and take what you say seriously.

These are people, after all, who have decided to spend weeks concentrating on the subject on which you are about to speak. Not only that, but in front of the room is a professor who has dedicated a good deal of her intellectual life to the same subject.

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The classroom theater is intense, highly lit. It is the supreme antithesis to Plato’s cave.

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It’s not a comfortable place to be, exposed out there in search of the truth. One reason the university has always been a profoundly idealized cultural location is that people instinctively respect the collective effort toward intellectual clarity and maturation.

You’re in the university classroom to be changed.

… For all the weighty material, [he] had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

… As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled.

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

… But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

[He] chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change … [H]e liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled…

Professor Obama, at the University of Chicago, relied on the fact that his students were engaged, willing to be unsettled, willing to risk responding to his provocations. … Why do you think Jose Bowen calls his movement the Teach Naked movement? At its best, in its essence, teaching has always been about exposure: Exposure of the thinking self, exposure of complex, contested truths.

Exposure over time, which is why a lot of PowerPoint use, with its Here it is, folks bullets, is bullshit. The classroom theater is narrative drama — You come back to that room again and again as, through slow and intense intellectual and social interaction, the deeper realities of the world reveal themselves.

Another Trinity professor gets it: “The kind of interactions that make a class dynamic get muted [with laptops]. Just keep typing, keep clicking, rather than … think on your feet or mull over an idea that a classmate or professor has just presented.”

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Does the classroom picture I’ve drawn describe every valuable and authentic university course? No. But it certainly describes the ideal of many university courses, no matter what the subject.

University courses are teaching you how to think about anything, not merely how to think about their particular subject matter. Professors are modeling the disciplined and unimpeded and active use of reason generally.

Listen to what the Trinity professors are trying to tell you.

“Sitting in a room with people to talk about ideas is a very precious experience. Once people graduate, they won’t necessarily have this experience on a daily basis.”

But they’re really not. Only a few Moo‘s come along in one’s lifetime.

UD has lately been enjoying Stubborn as a Mule, a first novel by Harvard law professor R.H. Fallon, Jr.

Mule goes after – among other things – the Chicago School of Economics.

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This New York Times review seems to be announcing another good academic satire, this one very topical, and also pertinent to an ongoing preoccupation of UD‘s — conflict of interest in academic science.

Tech Transfer is by Daniel Greenberg, a science journalist who for many years wrote for the New York Times.

Even at the Times he had a satirical bent; he wrote, in some of his columns, about a university unit called Center for the Absorption of Federal Funds. The Center’s director, Dr. Grant Swinger, specialized in “instantly redirecting his center’s activities to whatever scientific fad was highest on legislators’ priority list. He would have been first to set up a stem-cell research institute and get the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to promise him a building.”

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The new university president in Tech Transfer quickly learns the non-negotiable demands of his faculty:

These included annual pay increases, lax to near-non-existent conflict-of-interest and conflict-of-commitment regulations, and ample pools of powerless grad students, postdocs and adjuncts to minimize professorial workloads. As a safety net, the faculty favored disciplinary procedures that virtually assured acquittal of members accused of abusing subordinates, seducing students, committing plagiarism, fabricating data, or violating the one-day-a-week limit on money-making outside dealings.

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The real center for the absorption of federal funds these days is of course the for-profit higher education industry.

… in our back woods. I went back and
forth with him last night, hooting.

Here’s his song.