The nitty-gritty at the University of Massachusetts.

… fails to bring context to SUNY Albany student hazing and other rituals. Like Chico State and U Mass Amherst, SUNY Albany is one of America’s most violent, dangerous universities. Fights, sometimes escalating to riots, are part of the fabric of life for students, faculty, and the surrounding communities. Suspensions happen; a few fraternities get shuttered… Nothing changes. Things get worse. The administrations of these universities assume a sort of perpetual crouch, waiting in dread for the next horror.

Naturally, an important element of the SUNY Albany mix is a huge expenditure of funds on sports. Without it, Albany wouldn’t be able to attract all those applicants who want to come to SUNY to watch games and get drunk and beat up people.

Imagine a male professor up for tenure at Amherst who was found to have been, from his dissertation on, a plagiarist. Would the article about it in the campus newspaper write sympathetically of his “struggles and insecurities with writing”? The commenter I quote in the title of this post is struck by the same thing that strikes UD: We’re supposed to soften our response to this person – a person about to be promoted to Amherst’s senior faculty – because “writing is hard for some of us.”

Women won’t get far in the face of this sort of sexism.

Reviewing my University of Tennessee posts in light of the most recent event there – an alcohol enema party that almost killed someone – I find myself pretty overwhelmed by the comprehensive degeneracy of that school. Other universities in America are pretty disgusting (the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for instance, has a large drunken violent student body), but UT has a special combination of corrupt sports teams, corrupt coaches, indifferent leaders, and desperately alcoholic students that makes it truly madly deeply disgusting.

He writes an opinion piece in the school newspaper protesting the destruction of the university by athletics.

You’d think newspapers at Auburn and Clemson and Georgia and Montana and all of the other American universities degraded by big-time sports would feature similar professors – committed, responsible people capable of tracking and analyzing the deterioration and writing about it. Hell, many of these people have tenure, a level of job security unimaginable to most people. But – as UD discussed in what seems to have become her most famous column – for a variety of reasons, they don’t say anything.

Rutgers is an exception. William C. Dowling – a Rutgers English professor – wrote a 2007 book about how sports has long undone, and continues to undo, Rutgers. And now, with things far, far worse than when Dowling’s book came out, an economics professor there – Mark Killingworth – has described the ongoing (and, old UD will guess, ultimately failed) effort to “clean up” after its athletics mess.

A New York Times article about Dowling was written in 2007, when things looked way cool at Rutgers athletics. The author writes that “the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university.”

Really? Here’s Killingworth, 2012:

[B]ig-time University athletics hasn’t attracted more first-year students with high SAT scores, and hasn’t raised our “yield” (percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend), relative to peer institutions. Our academic rankings are sliding steadily downwards, and for two years running, our enormous athletic subsidies have landed us in the Wall Street Journal’s “football grid of shame.” This isn’t “building the brand” — it’s making us a punchline.

What happened to all them big donations and big smart students?

See, this is something sports factories don’t want to parse for you, but getting more jerks to apply to your school because they want to get pissed and join the fun is not a good trend. The state of Massachusetts has set up the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take those students.

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Killingworth touches on the Rutgers board of trustees. He is far too kind, merely asking them to “rethink their priorities.” No. They are the people who killed Rutgers. Like Penn State’s trustees (UD predicts all or most of them will resign in the coming months) they should be booted. Instead of holding the university in their trust and working toward its benefit, they shat on it and created the absolute failure Killingworth describes. Out they go.

As faithful readers know, UD designated the University of Massachusetts Amherst one of her first ‘Online Makeover’ schools – schools so violent, such a direct threat to their neighborhoods, such an insult to the word university, that they should be shut down as physical entities, and reopened as exclusively online institutions. The U Mass student’s comment in this post’s headline says it all, as does the long review, in this article, of the history of student riots there.

At U Mass the drunken shits have won; it’s their traditions that dominate and define the campus. The school has proved incapable of taking itself back from a powerful bloc of vicious fools, which means that it’s no school at all. For the sake of public safety, the image of the state, and the reputation of the university as an institution, the legislature should put it out of its misery.

… the University of Georgia the worst university in America (scroll down). But the grotesquely violent University of Massachusetts Amherst – a sort of baccalaureate Beirut – certainly holds the number two position. Do they have gang-legacy admissions? UD wonders how they manage to score, every year, the biggest baddest bandits among the country’s undergraduate pool.

It’s not merely the drunken riots – a staple of many large state schools. It’s things like this – home invasion, assault, and robbery – that distinguish U Mass. How many universities boast groups of hardened criminals among their undergrads?

… are staggering.

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Poets like dust – the brief, lovely word itself, and the image. Dust conveys our dissolution into insubstantiality at death. Dust to dust.

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Take Dust, by Rupert Brooke:

When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;

And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know—poor fools, they’ll know!—
One moment, what it is to love.

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It’s a simple, three-part argument about the way love transcends death.

1.) When we two lovers are almost dead – immobile, each of us alone in our bed, barely breathing, but still thinking – our spirits will be released to fly about like dust to all the places we spent time in when we were living.

2.) Eventually we’ll zoom in on one place in particular – the place of our ultimate rendezvous, our final merging, with one another.

3.) This will be an enclosed garden, safe from the wind that we’ve been riding to get here, and it will be sunset in the garden. A pair of young lovers will be there, and they will witness our strange and amazing passage from earth-bound dying lovers to heavenly eternal lovers. The “shattering ecstasy” of our passion for one another will be a brief but intense lesson to those lesser, sublunary lovers as to what true love is.

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Fleetwood Mac.

The University of Massachusetts system has attracted a lot of attention on this blog lately — whoring after bone marrow, whoring after Adderall, upsetting the neighbors, adding – at a time of low employment for new lawyers, and in a state with plenty of law schools – an unimpressive new law school…

Some of these things are typical university events (the drugs; annoying the neighbors) some are weird (the marrow) and some are bafflingly self-destructive (the law school). When you put them all together, they suggest a system adrift.

A reader, Jeremy, sends UD this article from today’s Boston Globe about the “oversubscribed classes and faculty shortage” on the Amherst campus. They’ve gone seriously adjunct and way-seriously online. “Only half of UMass Amherst students graduate in four years, and 66 percent do so in six years.” We know that the online course completion rate is much lower than the in-class, so these numbers will almost certainly rise. A sociology professor summarizes: “The expectation has cheapened.’’

Students are sitting in dorm rooms teaching themselves by watching movies with their professors in them.

Eventually the state of Massachusetts will see the light. It will shut down the physical U Mass campus and put the whole thing online.

… the poet and translator Richard Wilbur, who’s chugging along nicely at 89, with Anterooms, a new book of poems and translations. The Amherst Bulletin has a terrific article about him; it includes this poem, from the new collection, written in memory of Wilbur’s wife.

The House

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

There’s something about these poems of the long-married… Like this similar one by Stephen Spender... These poems can feature a peculiar intimacy with the unconscious of the much-loved, much-lived-with person. The lover intuits the loved-one’s dreams from what the beloved speaks in sleep; or from what she tells him about her dreams on waking.

And these dreams clearly represent a profoundly privileged territory, a deep-lying region of the truest personal truths, the purest contingencies of one particular person. It’s no surprise that Wilbur, seeking a sort of contact with his dead wife, will go here, to the realm he alone was able to perceive while she lived, that he would constantly “put to sea” in search of the most rooted place her mind inhabited, her islanded house inside life’s flow.

Think of Matthew Arnold’s To Marguerite: Continued, in which another separated pair of lovers laments their separation:

For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain —
Oh might our marges meet again!

Meanwhile, there’s “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea,” the same sea Wilbur sails over night after night, his own dreams trying to become hers, trying to be her dreaming mind, in order to find her, transcended, finally at home.

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Widow’s walk. Salt. There’s no idealizing here; it is the grave, the salt salt sea, the white hotel of D.M. Thomas’s novel, the strange infinity of our ceasing, whose reality we allow ourselves to feel in dream-image.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

This is the conclusion of Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. This is the way you make love when the person you love has died: you set out as wisely and foolishly as you can on that wide water, and keep looking.

Her nickname’s Bambi.

An investigation begun in October of a plagiarism allegation against Blandina Cardenas, president of the University of Texas at Pan American, is still under way.

Barry Burgdorf, vice chancellor and general counsel of the UT System, said today that the system’s Board of Regents was briefed on the review during a closed-door session on Friday. Burgdorf is overseeing the investigation along with David Prior, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.

The review was prompted by a packet of materials, sent anonymously to UT System administrators and news organizations, alleging that Cardenas plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. She received her doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1974, according to UT System records.

In 2007, Cardenas reimbursed UT-Pan American for more than $7,000 in improvements to her home and for use of a campus vehicle after auditors found UT System rules were violated…

Background here.