… settles in for more years of state-sponsored locked-in syndrome with occasional violent twitches, the British system begins to show a little movement.

Britain’s elite universities should be allowed to privatise to form a US-style Ivy league, a senior vice-chancellor said today.

Sir Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College, said institutions including his own, as well as Cambridge and Oxford universities, should be freed from state control to allow them to charge students more than the current £3,140 capped fees and recruit greater numbers of international students to boost their income.

… “The trouble is all, universities are too dependent on the government. You don’t want to be subject to the mores of government funding or changing educational structures.”…

France, Italy, and Greece remain the hopeless paralytics of European higher education, leaving the path clear for Germany and England and everybody else.

… only slightly better than that of Greece, will reform itself a little bit.

The Italian Parliament on Thursday gave a definitive green light to a government decree designed to promote meritocracy in Italy’s higher education system and overhaul the hiring of university staff.

“Today the university system changes,” Italian Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said after the Chamber of Deputies okayed the decree with 281 in favor, 196 against and 28 abstentions.

Among measures introduced in the decree, which forms part of a wider program of cost-cutting reforms for the sector yet to be finalized, 7 percent of government funds allocated to universities will be shared out on a performance basis from 2009, rewarding universities which demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.

In a bid to help out people at the start of their careers, 60 percent of funds must be spent on the employment of young researchers.

The decree also increases funding for research studentships by 135 million euros from this year.

The decree has been welcomed by some university bodies including the Conference of Italian University Chancellors and heads of research institutes.

There is a general consensus that the university system, which fails to gain a single entry in the top 100 universities in the world and which Gelmini has said “produces fewer graduates than Chile,” needs to be overhauled.

But critics have downplayed the usefulness of the decree in the light of government spending cuts of an estimated 1.5 billion euros in the sector planned from 2010.

Background here.

That’s because for decades Greek fans have been killing people and torching cities and all. The hapless government thinks a temporary pause and some more security cameras will bring Peace in Our Time, but this latest scheme will work out just as well as Chamberlain’s. I guess it’s real hard to confront the only thing to be done with a significant population of nihilist shits: No. More. Soccer.

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

A BAD CROWD

Since that’s way rad an idea, let me say a bit more about pre-modern and postmodern crowds, and how they’re making crowds themselves obsolete.

The Greek football fans generate primitive, pre-modern crowding, all about atavistic drives among men. We had one of these recently in the States — the mass shooter at the Super Bowl victory parade was just, you know, hormones, spoiling for a fight.

Any scenario that surrounds fundamentally aggressive men with other young men will bring out the AK47 (that’s new — primitive cavemen had rocks), or, outside of gun-drenched USA, knives. And not just random young men: It was a signal cultural moment when the sixty year old owner of a soccer team got angry and ran onto the field during a game, with a gun in his outstretched hand to kill a referee.

You understand – yes? – the message Savvidis sent to all random hormoned-up young men? What I’m doing is a highly charismatic act.

You make matters worse when you present these people with established ‘enemies’ – opposing domestic or foreign teams. They don’t have to – like the Super Bowl shooter – go looking for enemies. You’ve set up a war for them to fight in, collectively, cuz they’re part of… a crowd.

And it’s an all-male, all-young crowd, right? Didn’t use to be, but over the years women children and older people have arrived at the conclusion that Greek soccer stadiums are not conducive to longevity, let alone a fun afternoon. So now you’ve concentrated the scariest element of society into loud sweaty excited rageful quarters.

So Greece is simply farther along in the evolution toward the end of crowds: It has watched for decades as its soccer matches – increasing numbers of them – devolve into fatal violence. It has tried everything, including, indeed, the end of crowds. The country is coming off of a two-month moratorium on soccer attendees.

But now that they’re letting these incredibly dangerous groups of people back in, what do they think is going to happen?

So, you know, we’re getting the stern announcements about enhancements of the police state they’ve already set up in the stadiums – vast numbers of security cameras, police, mandatory digital identification, weapon checks, blah blah.

Will it work? Keep your eye on Miami’s spring break. It’s happening right now. Those crowds are so awful that Miami released this ad a couple of weeks ago, and has made clear that it does in fact want the total end of those crowds. We don’t want you. Don’t come here. AND here are all the police state goodies we’re throwing at you if you come anyway. Let’s see if it works. Might make the guys madder, you know.

Anyway, so Greece. So what was once supposed to be A GAME, a certain thing, a sports gathering, is now – you understand? – a kind of lord of the flies free for all held perilously in check by insane levels of surveillance technology plus a very large, very frightened, security force. The players are scared, and not just the ones dreading racist chants. The referees? Forget about it. You know that groups of them have gone on strike because of the attacks.

So my thing is who’s kidding who. Eventually it won’t just be Savvidis packing heat. Obvious escalations of an already lurid situation are on their way, and we know from security’s inability to stop a mass shooting at the Super Bowl parade that guns are too quick and easy and lethal to police.

Think security will find weapons and confiscate them? Haha. Check out how many smuggled guns are discovered every day at all of America’s airports. People are always trying, and think about how many guns the TSA isn’t finding.

When crowds become impossible, what are your choices? You can try identifying and excluding the evil doers, but you’ll never get them all, and of course they’re evil enough to figure out how to get into the stadium no matter what you do. You can get to North Korean levels of police state apparatus, I guess (lines of soldiers with guns pointed at the crowd throughout? torture chambers below the locker rooms?), but this won’t be very… pretty. No, UD is thinking that Greece (and other countries) will have to shut down the whole thing.

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

Our highly advanced postmodern crowds are a whole other thing. It’s their innocence that gets you. They are sitting ducks, awaiting the Las Vegas shooter, the Prague shooter, the Highland Park shooter. They are gathered to enjoy a concert, a parade, or just a sunny afternoon on the campus of Charles University. Massive, extensive, the highest of high-tech firepower rains down upon them from a heavily fortified genius who has thought everything out to guarantee he’ll be able to shoot for a long time and kill a lot of people.

I don’t think American parades or outdoor concerts have a very long shelf life either.

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

Oh, and on the subject of Greek violence — We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the petrol bombs being thrown at police, even as we speak, in opposition to the government’s shocking intention to allow private universities to operate freely in Greece.

Yes! What’ll they think of next? Private, as well as, public universities!

Most Greeks are in favor; over 40,000 of the smartest young Greeks currently study abroad, having fled the squalid corrupt national system. (Put Greece university in my search engine.) Competition might wake up the dead public campuses and reverse the brain drain, but who would want to do that?

From her years of covering university and non-university fraud stories, UD has learned a few things.

1. Everyone steals. (No, no, no, I know that not EVERYONE steals. But if you take the long view, it sure as hell looks as though almost everyone, at some time or another, in some denomination or other, steals.)
2. When lusty lifelong larcenists get caught, they suddenly turn out to be harboring hundreds of one hundred percent debilitating physical and mental illnesses.

UD gets that this is a legal strategy – he was too crazy to know what he was doing while he spent twenty years stealing from institutions in the subtlest, most brilliantly devious and undetectable ways – ways that fooled even the best auditors. His lifelong depression and anxiety made it impossible for him to truly enjoy the robust beach vacations he took at the expensive condo he bought with purloined funds; he could barely turn the wheel of the Lexus SUV he got with his booty. He is a broken man, in short, and an hour in a lockup will bring on a fatal flare of his heart attack issues.

UD saw the most brazen use of he’s half dead and prison will kill him in the Greek university system, quite possibly the world’s most disgusting. From one of many such stories:

[In the matter of the] enormous, long-running theft of funds by the leadership of Panteion University:

The thieving rector, Emilios Metaxopoulous, is already out of prison, a few months into his 25-year sentence. No doubt a fine Greek surgeon (“A U.K. court on Wednesday jailed a former executive of medical-goods supplier DePuy International Ltd., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for channeling £4.5 million ($7 million) in bribes to Greek surgeons…. [Greek surgeons’] demands for bribes have put operations out of reach for some Greeks. Stents for heart operations, for example, cost up to five times as much in Greece as in Germany…”) was found to attest to his deathly illness.

The vice-rector, serving a 16-year sentence, preceded the rector out of prison, for he also has a deathly illness. The vice-rector seems to have been in jail for twenty minutes or so.

More recently, a Florida man who spent decades stealing hundreds of thousands from the United Way looked like this in court:

[Guy Thompson] became emotional at times, such as when the mental health counselor who performed his forensic mental health evaluation, John Bingham, discussed how Thompson suffered from major depressive disorder stemming from family troubles in his childhood and a pressure to provide in adulthood for his family members, who were “big spenders.”

Bingham testified that Thompson was “very upset and remorseful of the whole situation” and “very upset with himself for having engaged in that behavior.” 

He also said Thompson had depression and anxiety for nearly his entire life, and had indicated he might have a mild neurological impairment. 

[Thompson’s attorney] told the court that since Thompson was arrested and charged, he has been diagnosed with early onset dementia, has had a pacemaker installed, has hypertension and has been seen by numerous doctors and specialists.

Sing it!

I am the very model of a medical catastrophe.

Inside of all my organs there’s a heightened state of atrophy…

Return with me now to those glory days at one of this country’s establishments of higher learning, when Rick got down on his knees and begged Sebastian Telfair to gain his education at the University of Louisville. Telfair said yes! I will pursue my scholar/athlete career at your fine school, playing basketball, living in a university-provided brothel, and giving a big ol’ fuck you up the ass to my fake classes, all on the taxpayers’ dime — and the people of Kentucky could not have been more grateful and excited. To make matters even more wonderful, sports-mad James Ramsey, who would go on to become the nation’s highest paid public university leader by the simple expedient of stealing everything at UL that wasn’t nailed down, had just been appointed UL president!

Truly the stars were aligned at this fine school which some have taken, cruelly, to calling the U of Smell.

And now… Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! as Humbert would say: Look at this tangle of thorns.

Rick had to be gotten rid of because of sex, recruiting, financial and anything else you’d like to add scandals. Reduced to coaching Greek basketball, where the chain smoking, flame throwing fascists in the stands turn every game into a terrifying slaughter (holy shitkos), he is currently suing UL for forty million dollars haha nahnah got you you’ll pay up the ass for being mean to me while I was building a winning team even though we had to vacate all our wins cuz they was SO SO SO dirty. I’ll get you back, UL.

President Ramsay was forced to resign in disgrace for the aforementioned larceny plus overseeing the most pornographic sports program in the United States. UL’s suing him to try to get a few tens of millions back (it’s all been plowed into multifarious mcmansions up and down the Florida coast), and the latest on that is that during his reign Ramsay apparently told the then-chair of the board of trustees that a fellow trustee had bankrolled the brothel for the boys!! I do declare (fanning my lace stays with my perfumed hankie), it takes a whole lot for UL to do anything that would generate italics, bolding, and double exclamation marks, but this school constantly exceeds expectations.

… Uh, where we were? Oh, the hotly recruited Telfair... He was last seen ranting like a madman in court, where he was sentenced to prison for carrying spectacular weaponry (‘three loaded handguns, a submachine gun, ammunition, extended magazines and a ballistic vest’) in his car.

The air inside the arena was thick with smoke from cigarettes and flares, and the stands were packed with frothing fans. Almost none of them were women. There were even fewer children. In the front row, one man wearing white-and-green face paint shook a giant inflatable penis at the Olympiacos bench. Not far from him, another man, also in face paint, was shirtless and played a bongo he’d somehow smuggled into the arena. Basket teams in Greece have firms, just like European soccer clubs. Each part of the main fan area was divided into subsections with signs for identification: Victoria, Skyros, the Hooligans, Gate 13, Kavala, and, the hardest to miss, West Block, which unfurled a giant banner from the upper deck with a menacing gas mask emblem. When the Olympiacos players came out for warm-ups, the fans made the Greek fuck-you gesture and chanted in unison. I asked [my Greek companion] what they were saying, and he smiled: “Olympiacos, motherfuckers.”

Coach of Panathinaikos, the rival team? The University of Louisville’s most famous, most celebrated, most highly compensated (but not compensated enough: he’s currently suing the school for forty million dollars) personality: Rick Pitino. Read the whole article and you’ll see that Rick has finally found his level.

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

And on the domestic front…

YEEHAW!!!! RIDE EM COWBOY!!!!

Report: Southern Miss Coach Who Wanted To Hire Art Briles Also Tried To Add A Player Accused Of Two Knifepoint Rapes

As for student representation in the Rectorate, this is another privilege given to students that essentially ties the hands of university administrations. Students seldom agree with administration decisions. For instance, the issue of hiring private security staff for campuses in 2014 was met with violent reactions from party youths. No security staff was ever hired. As for Rectors and Rectorates, they cannot even report thefts taking place in campuses. When computers are stolen from university premises, university administrations report that “they are missing,” because theft is too strong a word to use.

***********

Can’t argue with the results.

Early [last Monday] morning, some 15 people occupied the [University of Athens] computer center, holding hostage the email accounts of faculty members, students and administrative personnel, including those of the University of Athens hospitals. With a few exceptions, nobody has condemned what has happened, and no university officials have dared appeal to the authorities, for fear of retaliation. Physical violence and bullying is so common in Greek universities and across Greece that almost nobody dares react anymore.

This blog has covered – as much as it can bear to – the fate of universities in Greece [scroll down]. Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, explains the typically vicious response to the prospect of an electronic vote on university reform.

The shocking condition of Greece’s universities – a corrupt, violent, state tax collection system – has finally mobilized legislators. They’ve passed a strong reform bill, insisting on admissions standards, administrative autonomy and accountability, limits on the number of years people can be students, rational curricula, etc., etc.

As the opinion writer in my headline notes, the most staggering fact about Greek universities (scroll down for earlier posts about them) is their purposelessness. Of course in response to the legislation their complacent stakeholders have moved to shut them down, trash them, etc. But how to tell the difference between this and the status quo?

… is the author of

Tea, D.A. Powell.

From the New York Times Arts, Briefly blog:

In its continuing unofficial mission to prove that a poetry career need not condemn an author to a life of destitution, Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of its highly lucrative Kingsley and Kate Tufts poetry awards. The Kingsley Tufts Award, which comes with a prize of $100,000, will go to D. A. Powell for his [latest] collection “Chronic” (Graywolf Press), the university said in a news release. Mr. Powell, a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s poetry award, also for “Chronic”; his previous collection “Cocktails,” was also a finalist for that honor….

Let’s look up close at one of Powell’s poems from Chronic, coal of this unquickened world.

Powell got his title from Philip Larkin.

In 1944, early in his writing life, Larkin wrote this poem.

Night-Music

At one the wind rose,
And with it the noise
Of the black poplars.

Long since had the living
By a thin twine
Been led into their dreams
Where lanterns shine
Under a still veil
Of falling streams;
Long since had the dead
Become untroubled
In the light soil.
There were no mouths
To drink of the wind,
Nor any eyes
To sharpen on the stars’
Wide heaven-holding,
Only the sound
Long sibilant-muscled trees
Were lifting up, the black poplars.

And in their blazing solitude
The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’

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

Powell will hyper-literalize Larkin’s coal and turn out, as we’ll see in a moment, quite an amazing poem – a poem without the sad formal measure Larkin gets with his TS Eliotish short, short lines (Wallace Stevens gets an effect like Larkin’s here, in Domination of Black.)

Larkin’s pulled back lines let him express the pulled back midnight world, very silent except for the sound the sibilant poplars make in the wind. The poplars are green of course when it’s day; at night, they become, like everything but the stars, black.

It’s a wiped-out world. No one’s awake, except the poet recording the silent world with its bit of song from the trees. Everyone’s asleep, ushered out of consciousness into the weakly-lit theater of dreams. The world of the dead too is meager, thin. They lie “untroubled / in the light soil.” No eyes are open to “sharpen on the stars’ / Wide heaven-holding.” (In After Greece, James Merrill’s ancestors are “anxious to know / What holds up heaven nowadays.”)

Larkin in many of his poems loves to record the ghostly insinuating life of the world that goes on without us, while we’re sleeping or while we’re dead. His most famous rendition of this weird activity appears in An Arundel Tomb. “Pre-baroque” lovers are buried beneath a stone sculpture of the two them lying side by side, hand in hand. The poet imagines the long centuries during which the world’s life has revolved around their motionlessness:

Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground

Thronged is wonderful.

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

Back to Night-Music, and the way Larkin conveys with all of his images the perilous delicacy, the fragile contingency, of earthly existence.

We have no eyes, but the stars have eyes; the song they sing “in their sockets through the night” is a magical invocation to the wind to wake us and our world up again:

`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’

This black cinder globe with yet a bit of fire in its ash — blow on it, bring it back to life, quicken it. Our time here is brief and perilous, but, pray, make our cheeks ruddy…

Those three hard k sounds are gorgeous – coal, unquickened – but it’s more than this that drew Powell to the line. Here’s his poem.

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

D.A. Powell

coal of this unquickened world

midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last

must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head

dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot

dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above

smothering in the walrus suit, the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke

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

Let me take a break from this post and then return to talk about Powell’s poem.

The Independent provides more detail about Greek universities:

… [A]cademics and concerned citizens are increasing calls for authorities to revise – if not scrap – the so-called asylum law which in recent years has allowed extremists to seek haven within university campuses, turning them into launching pads for their offensives against police.

“This has to stop,” said Ioannis Karakostas, a professor of law and deputy rector of Athens University. “These extremist elements are abusing the law to suit their own agendas and not the founding spirit of the law, which is to shelter and shield free thought.”

The rector, Christos Kittas, was attacked last Saturday when about 100 masked anarchists stormed the soaring green gates of the university – seizing control of the marble neo-classical building amid violent riots sparked during demonstrations commemorating last year’s police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15.

Because of the law, thousands of officers and riot police stood idle, watching youths destroy the building, tear down the Greek flag, set it ablaze and then hoist a black-and-red anarchist banner over the university’s rooftop. The televised scenes sent shock waves across the country, fanning debate on the controversial asylum law.

“I felt dead inside watching people who could be my grandchildren or students commit crimes and vandalise the shrine of free thought,” Mr Kittas said on Wednesday.

To the fury of the “anarchists”, the board of directors at Athens Law School have proposed a raft of bold measures to shield the institution from further attacks including student identification cards intended to ward off militant intruders…

What’s most striking to UD about the unbelievable Greek story – beyond the violence – is the apparent nothingness of the violent forces themselves. Various journalists give them various names — “anarchists” in those telling quotation marks, anti-government forces, radicals — but from what I can tell they’re nihilists who like to bludgeon people and burn buildings.

From the excellent student newspaper at benighted Southern Illinois University:

… Reports from The Associated Press this week link trustee Frank William Bonan II to $30,000 his father and uncle donated to Blagojevich in November, a month after he was appointed to the board.

Those donations came during a one-day fundraising trip by Blagojevich to Mount Vernon, which netted him $42,000. Of that money, $30,000 came from Market Street Bancshares Inc. and its managers, J. Hunt Bonan and F.William Bonan I.

Records from the State Board of Elections show Blagojevich was the beneficiary of about $25,000 in donations from at least two other trustees between 2005 and 2008.

[The chairman of the board], who was appointed in 2004, contributed $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2005 and 2006. Tedrick also contributed another $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2002 and 2003.

Trustee John Simmons, a 2004 appointee who is an attorney from Alton, and his wife, Jayne, contributed three $5,000 donations between 2006 and 2008 for a total of $15,000….

The comments on the article suggest that, uh, everybody’s pretty disgusted with this disgusting board.

SIU had better watch it. Corruption levels like these … I mean… look at what’s going on in Greece. People can get really angry after enough of this.