From Fanhouse:

Texas’s Mack Brown became the highest-paid coach in college football this week when the university gave him a raise to at least $5.1 million annually.

Michael Granof, an accounting professor at Texas, says that doesn’t make sense at a time when the university is making academic cutbacks to make ends meet.

“The major problem today is one of timing,” Granof said in an interview on ESPN’s Outside the Lines. “The University of Texas is facing a major budget crisis. We’ve had layoffs, we’ve had major changes in the curriculum, the faculty has been meeting for the last month trying to figure out how to save a few hundred thousand dollars here and there, and I’ve never in all my years at the University of Texas heard so much outrage.”…

Two cases this year, both stunners.

The University of Ala­bama at Birmingham has asked that nine research papers by former UAB sci­entist H.M. Krishna Murthy be retracted because his ex­perimental findings appear to be false or fabricated.

One has already been re­tracted by the prestigious Journal of Biological Chem­­istry.

… UAB launched a probe of Murthy’s research in Janu­ary 2007 after the interna­tional scientific community began questioning the val­idity of molecular struc­tures he had published in respected scientific jour­nals such as Nature and the Journal of Molecular Bi­ology. A committee of ex­perts who had no conflicts of interest examined all the data and did a re-analysis of each molecular structure that was alleged to have been fabricated.

UAB found a preponder­ance of evidence that 11 protein structures “were more likely than not falsi­fied and/or fabricated…

… This is the second case of research misconduct at UAB reported this year. In July, two UAB scientists, Dr. Juan R. Contreras and Judith M. Thomas were barred by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity from re­ceiving grants and con­tracts after falsifying ani­mal study results. They no longer work at UAB.

… Murthy’s JBC work involved discovery of the molecular structure of a se­rine protease enzyme for the virus that causes the Dengue and Dengue hem­orrhagic fevers. The work was important — Dengue fever strikes about 100 mil­lion people each year and kills thousands…

… on the faculty of the University of Chicago when Les UDs were students there, has died.

… “His big contribution was to bring philosophy from the abstractions of reason and logic — Plato’s world — to the reasonableness of making inquiries into human situations in which questions of morals, ethics and logic come to life,” said Roy Pea, the director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning at Stanford University.

… Mr. Toulmin’s provocative ideas often encountered resistance at first, especially in Britain, and his work on argument was no exception. He proposed, instead of formal logic’s three-part syllogism, a model of persuasive argument consisting of six components. Some, he maintained, apply universally but others do not. Arguments, in other words, do not unfold in a Platonic ether, but in particular contexts…

From his 1997 Jefferson Lecture:

Print taught readers to recognize the complexity and diversity of our human experience: instead of abstract theories of Sin and Grace, it gave them rich narratives about concrete human circumstances. Aquinas had been all very well, but figures like Don Quixote or Gargantua were irresistible. You did not have to approve of, or condemn such figures: rather, they were mirrors in which to reflect your own life. Like today’s film makers, 16th century writers in the Humanities from Erasmus and Thomas More to Montaigne and Shakespeare present readers with the kaleidoscope of life. We get from them a feeling for the individuality of characters: no one can mistake Hamlet for Sancho Panza, or Pantagruel for Othello. What count are the differences among people, not the generalities they share. As Eudora Welty said in appreciation of V.S. Pritchett, who died just recently at the age of 96: ‘The characters that fill [his stories] — erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all peculiar unto themselves — hold a claim on us that cannot be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in the revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lives come into view. How much the eccentric has to tell us of what is central!’

… Writing early in World War II, near the end of his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, [Wallace Stevens] refers [to] the contrast I have emphasized here, between reasonableness and rationality. For him, too, Reasonableness is more important than Rationality; and its importance is itself more than an intellectual one. It is the expression – as he puts it – of a “more than rational distortion – the fiction that results from feeling.” I recall one of my Chicago colleagues lecturing on the theme, “Is it rational to act reasonably?” Unless reasonable actions could be proved to fit his abstract moral theory with geometrical precision, respect for human frailty was for him intellectually suspect. Yet, rather than ask, “Is it rational to be reasonable?”, we might equally well ask, “Is it reasonable to argue in rational terms alone? In what situations can we reasonably rely on formal theories?”

… To sum up: like the uniqueness of names, the individuality or particularity of cases and characters divides the world of practice, in its actuality, from the world of theory, with its abstractions. Behind the contrast of the reasonable and the rational, behind the rival attractions of Nation State and Global Future, underlying the survival in a time of general toleration of the things Jefferson called bigotry and priestcraft, lie abstractions that may still tempt us back into the dogmatism, chauvinism and sectarianism our needs have outgrown… Nor is this conflict likely to be resolved permanently. It is another of those conflicts that demand eternal vigilance. So listen again to Wallace Stevens, writing in 1942… :

We shall return at twilight from the lecture,
Pleased that the irrational is rational . . . .
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

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

More on Toulmin. An interviewer summarizes:

[L]ike Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, and many others, Toulmin sees “no legitimate role for theory” and advises that we “be prepared to kiss rationalism goodbye and walk off in the opposite direction with joy in our hearts.” These views are entirely understandable given the fact that Toulmin’s mentor at Cambridge and his principal intellectual influence was Wittgenstein, from whom he inherited “a kind of classical skepticism.” As a committed pragmatist, then, Toulmin’s life’s work has concerned “the recovery of the tradition of practical philosophy that was submerged after the intellectual triumph of theory in the seventeenth century.”

… Toulmin would rather be known as a “neo-premodernist” than as a postmodernist; he believes “the thing to do after rejecting Cartesianism is not to go on through the wreckage of the temple but to go back into the town where this heretical temple was built and rediscover the life that was lived by people for many centuries before the rationalist dream seized hold of people’s minds.”

From his remarks during the interview:

[Jürgen] Habermas comes here to Northwestern most years, and we have a jolly two or three days when he’s here. He gives a couple of lectures, usually on Kant’s ethics as being the ultimate font of universalization and impartiality and the rest. He and I have a kind of joking relationship: he gets up and denounces the neo-Aristotelians, by whom he means some people in Germany who call themselves neo-Aristotelians; then I get up like St. Sebastian, take the arrows full in my chest, and say, “I’m happy to be a neo-Aristotelian.” So we chew that one a bit. Sometimes I ask my colleague Tom McCarthy, “What’s really biting Jürgen; why does he have so much investment in his pragmatics being universal?” Tom explains how different it was growing up in Germany after the Second World War from growing up in England just before and during the Second World War. We really do come out of situations in which what reasonably mattered to us was very different.

… There was a very intelligent conservative politician called Edward Boyle who died ridiculously young. I remember having an amusing conversation with him in which he was explaining how there were certain nineteenth-century novelists–the one he chose to talk about was Thomas Hardy–who could only have written after the invention of the railway and before the invention of the automobile. Chekhov is similar: everybody in Chekhov is always dreaming of going to Moscow in the same way that everybody in Hardy is dreaming of going to London. This comes out in Anna as well. One of the central things in Anna is that Anna finds herself in a series of situations that become progressively intolerable to her; she can’t cope. Because the moral demands made on her are for one reason or another too intense, too unbearable, what happens again and again is that she goes down to the railway station and gets on a train to go somewhere. Where the train is going is the last matter of importance. Right at the end, of course, she is doing it again, only this time a train journey is not enough. This is why, in some ways, the invention of the private car made it much harder to distinguish between the people with whom we are actively engaged in a moral way from day to day, and other people.

From Synapse, a University of California, San Francisco publication:

… [A]fter finishing an operation at UCSF Medical Center, a surgeon usually completes the operative report, answers questions from medical students and residents, and reviews the conduct of the procedure with nurses. What the general public is unaware of is that the surgeon then faces being besieged by sales representatives from the device and pharmaceutical industries as he or she walks through the hallways of the operating room on the way to the waiting room to talk to the patient’s family. While the sales representative’s primary role is to provide a service to other surgeons utilizing their equipment or products at a medical center, there are few restrictions on utilizing their access for sales calls.

Since their presence validates Senator Grassley’s concerns about the intrusion of corporate interests and the ethical compromises at academic medical centers, perhaps Senator Grassley will some day bring an end to the OR hallway activities at UCSF and other institutions, which may present a more pervasive concern than ghostwriting…

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.

Picture this

torn to bits,
its spine showing
shiny glue no
longer holding paper
to itself.

That’s UD‘s much-fussed-with
Schirmer’s edition of Handel’s Messiah.
It sits here on my desk
at the moment, next to
the equally shabby
Vintage Giant Ulysses
(I teach from the
controversial Gabler edition —

— not because I have a
position on the quality
of the edition, but because
it’s got larger, easier to read
pages than the Vintage.),
and next to the score
and the book is of course
a cup of tea.

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

Last night Gail, my cabbie friend,
drove me to the Landon School —
a private school for boys in ‘thesda.
(UD wrote about the
cheating scandal at Landon a few years back.)

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

A grad student of Mr UD‘s gave
him this thank you card a few weeks ago:

(She wrote that her dissertation
scared her every day, but Mr. UD
made it bearable… something like
that…)

UD found herself thinking about this
little saying as she took her
seat in the teeny soprano section (you
can’t run; you can’t hide) at the rear of
the General Music room.

To get there, you walk through the
cafeteria, its walls lined with vintage
photos of Landon sports teams.

You know how you can know something
and not know it? If you know what I mean?
UD‘s been singing and playing Messiah
since she was knee-high to grasshopper.
But does she really know it? Does she
know that all the Hallelujahs on page 203
are Ds? Hasn’t she thought for years that
some of them were DDGF?
Hasn’t she figured she can more or less do the runs
on His Yoke is Easy, and his Burthen is Light?
(The first piece on this YouTube is earlier music from which
Handel took the tune to His Yoke.)
Who knew that she absolutely totally cannot?

Still, she was game, and she sang out.
Do one thing every day that scares you.

Next rehearsal, next Wednesday.

… Yeshiva University … retained a law firm and an investment adviser to review its practices. YU has not made the firm’s findings public, but did say that as a result, the university recently hired a chief investment adviser, and implemented a conflict-of-interest policy for the investment committee. That policy is significant at YU, where [Ezra] Merkin, a money manager who ran one of the major Madoff feeder funds, managed portions of the YU endowment while serving as chair of the investment committee.

Wouldn’t want to make the findings public. That might make Yeshiva look diligent, transparent.

On the other hand, at least it’s doing something.

A University of Minnesota task force that proposes one-on-one remedial work with school of education students who fail to adopt mandated political views has attracted a lot of negative attention to that school. All sorts of people have pointed out that this profoundly anti-democratic initiative violates freedom of conscience.

Here’s the Minnesota damage control guy:

“It’s not at all what they’re suggesting — that it’s some sort of litmus test — it’s just making sure that teachers are prepared to deal with the different situations that they might have for each and every student — which has been a challenge in the past,” he said. “Teachers obviously come from one perspective, so if they’ve got 15 other people of different backgrounds in their classrooms it’s a completely different situation.”

No, actually teachers don’t come from one perspective. No one – except, it seems, the ideologues on the task force – comes at life from one perspective. Americans especially, for obvious historical and social reasons, tend in fact to be remarkably culturally flexible. It’s sickening and insulting that anyone in a position of responsibility would take what’s best in us, what’s made this country a success — our high levels of assimilation and tolerance, our ability to imagine our way into foreign worlds — and gut it on behalf of a witless reeducation program.

An organization working to impose a Sharia-law Islamic caliphate on the world through the destruction of democracy, cultural assimilation, and Jews, has free intellectual inquiry written all over it.

Students at the University of London invited a speaker from this organization — also gung-ho on suicide bombings — to a debate on their campus, but objections to the speaker from other students have been vociferous, and the event’s been canceled.

It must be frustrating for the pro-caliphate students. At University College London they invited a speaker who calls for the murder of all gay people. He too was canceled.

A University of Northern Iowa professor says she was told to alter a request for a sabbatical because the wording was too political.

Rebecca Burkhardt, a music professor who wants to write a musical about former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, included in her project description a famous Richards quote that former President George H.W. Bush “was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Burkhardt says an Iowa Board of Regents official asked that she and her research partner remove the quote before their description and dozens of others were made public last week with a regents meeting agenda.

… The researchers said they also were asked to strike: “Ann Richards was big, and so are musicals.”…

… Yiannis Panousis, a prominent criminologist at the University of Athens … was hospitalized in February after being set upon during a lecture by extremists with iron bars and sledgehammers.

It’s business as usual in the Greek university system, where a law keeping police off of university campuses has made them ground zero for assholes who throttle people trying to give lectures…

Anastassios Manthos, rector of Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University, who was knocked unconscious in a similar campus raid last year, said things had gotten worse. “The violence in universities, and in Greek society in general, is explosive and unprecedented,” he said.

Not business as usual. Worse.

…[T]here is a general climate of fear in universities…

One campus has decided to do something:

[T]he Athens Law School on Tuesday took a bold step toward restricting access to its campus, approving a program to issue identity cards for students and to place guards at its gates.

… is becoming a phrase to strike fear — or at least intense irritation — in the hearts of universities all over the United States. Whatever you think of his take on health care and other issues, Senator Charles Grassley is a fierce warden of public money, and he repeatedly goes after universities he suspects of wasting or in other ways misusing it. He writes them Grassley Letters asking them to account for what they’ve been doing with taxpayer money.

It’s usually when UD‘s talking about multiply-billioned Harvard, or football factories like the University of Alabama (which just cancelled a bunch of classes so everyone can go to a championship game), that she reminds readers of the remarkable tax breaks our campuses enjoy. They enjoy that non-profit status because they’re committed to the high ideals of educating citizens and generating important research. When it turns out that they’re just as committed to hoarding cash as they are to education, or when they ignore the whole education thing in favor of football, we should care. It’s our money they’re playing with.

America’s public universities of course don’t exhibit the structural corruption of, say, Greek and Italian universities. For the most part our schools are extremely cleanly run, it seems to UD; but Grassley and his staff have certainly uncovered questionable financial practices, and the ongoing story of the University of California San Francisco medical school is a good example. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

The UC system has agreed to hire PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a financial review at UCSF, after a U.S. senator raised concerns about allegations of money mismanagement and university officials making misleading statements to state leaders.

The allegations came from Dr. David Kessler, who was fired from his job as dean of the UCSF School of Medicine in 2007. Kessler had repeatedly questioned what he said were “financial irregularities” in the dean’s office budget.

In a letter to UC President Mark Yudof on Monday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote that he’s pleased that UC has agreed to an outside audit at UCSF, but noted several “troubling matters” at the university. He said UCSF administrators appear to have provided “misleading” statements to the California Senate.

… [Kessler’s] allegation relates to the dean’s discretionary funding budget, which he has said was millions of dollars less than what he’d been promised when he was hired in 2003. He conducted his own financial analysis in December 2004 and said he found an $18 million annual discrepancy…

These are large sums of money, and if it’s true that they’re missing, it would be good to know where they went.

Iranian forces hit hard against university student protesters.

This bit of footage — starting twenty seconds in — is the best I can do so far. La Kid’s in the chorus behind Sting, singing The Rising, at the homage to Bruce Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors last week. The show will be broadcast December 29 on CBS.

La Kid will also be part of the Christmas in Washington chorus. Barack Obama attends this event too. La Kid sees more of him than she sees of me. TNT broadcasts it on December 20.

Meanwhile, UD will be part of this chorus, performing Handel’s Messiah in ‘thesda on December 19. She plans to write about the experience on this her blog.

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

From Sting to Death Where is Thy Sting. This is UD‘s current Messiah favorite.

On the Northern Virginia Community College Woodbridge campus, a student in a math class took out a high-powered rifle and shot twice at his math professor.

The teacher saw the gun, yelled for her 25 students to duck and then hit the floor herself. The student missed, put the gun down, sat on a chair in the hallway and calmly waited for police to arrest him.

Jason Michael Hamilton of Baneberry Circle in the Manassas area was charged with attempted murder…