Or, as its originator put it, There’s no there there.

How do you make a university disappear?

In the age of the simulacrum, there are many ways.

There’s the process this blog has long called Online Makeover. You phone it in. You put it all online. You go the University of Phoenix route. Plenty of respectable universities are well on their way to this form of disappearance. Their professors outsource their grading to a drudge in India. They outsource the actual running – call it teaching – of the course to for-profit vendors under contract to their university. Vendor-provided “facilitators” do everything, and professors do nothing; they merely clock in to their online course occasionally to satisfy their supervisor that they’re doing something … For, as the language of an AAUP draft report on online changes notes:

Online teaching platforms and learning management systems may permit faculty members to learn whether students in a class did their work and how long they spent on certain assignments. Conversely, however, a college or university administration could use these systems to determine whether faculty members were logging into the service “enough,” spending “adequate” time on certain activities, and the like.

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And speaking of professors as supervised clockers-in, reason number two for the disappearance of the postmodern American university can be understood by considering what’s going on lately at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill: mandated spot inspections of classes.

To prove the legitimacy of classes, administrators have fanned out to hundreds of classrooms to verify that students and professors are present. Some departments even discussed bringing in photographers to document classes, according to one professor, Lew Margolis, a faculty member in public health.

As the real university ceases to exist (in UNC’s case, under the weight of hundreds of no there there courses for athletes and assorted others), professors must do their bit to persuade accrediting agencies their university does actually exist…

We DO believe in UNC! We DO we DO we DO we DO!

See, here’s what they’re up against:

[One University of North Carolina student took a class] in the fall of 2005 on Southern Africa that never met. He was a Florida native and undergraduate student paying out-of-state tuition at the time. He wrote the university seeking a tuition credit to make up for the education he did not receive.

[Julius] Nyang’oro was the professor…

“I visited (Nyang’oro) once, when he approved my topic and told me we would not have any scheduled meetings or talks, only that I could contact him if I had a problem,” Ferguson wrote.

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Universities aren’t universities because they can show that they have coaches; they’re universities because they can show that they have professors. Thus professors, at the postmodern American university, become – symbolically – the most important group on campus, routinely wheeled out to show the world that their university exists. While contract facilitators gradually take over the teaching, it will be the postmodern professor’s job to pace the campus pensively, ideally wearing an academic gown, as the professors at the College on the Hill, the central location in Don DeLillo’s iconic postmodern American novel White Noise do.

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Even when the postmodern American classroom exists, it may not really be anywhere in any meaningful sense. I’m talking about professors who do meet their students, human being to human being, but then instantly turn out the classroom lights, fire up the PowerPoint, put their heads down, and read out loud, while their students gaze at sports and porn on their laptops, play on their smart phones, or take advantage of the setting to get much-needed sleep.

The sleep thing goes to a third significant way in which universities disappear: They go from party schools to party businesses.
A professor at simulacral University of West Virginia explains the shift:

[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

There have always been party schools; the new thing, the thing that makes the party school go from partying to disappeared, is the university as party business, the recruitment and retention of students largely as a function of the provision of alcohol. Places like the University of Iowa, which are basically already distilleries, have had to weather a little dissent from students and faculty, but you can’t argue with the revenues, and UI is clearly recruiting students big-time on the basis of its alcoholic rep. So the synergy here is hung over students plus PowerPointing professors… At the distilleries, there’s really no reason to hold any non-virtual class. These schools will go, or are going, online. The one surviving form of human to human contact at these schools will take place in their stadiums.

… at the Kennedy Center last night.

La Kid‘s the blond on the right.

Click on the image for a better view.

(Photo taken by Tony Bennett’s daughter.)

La Kid just made it back to ‘thesda from this, where she performed for Billy Joel, one of the honorees. At the banquet after the show, she hobnobbed with Joel, Tony Bennett, and others. I’ll run some photos tomorrow, after she gets some sleep.

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The final performance of the evening was Joel’s famous hit “Piano Man,” with the Kennedy Center audience singing along.

That was the one with La Kid in the chorus.

Rufus Wainwright performed — and Brooks, Bennett and Henley took us back to the ’70s with “Piano Man.”

Trying to keep going a fire which wants to hiss more than flame, UD turns from the hearth to her snowy windows and thinks There must be a poem for this. She thinks of Wallace Stevens – The Snow Man – but she has read and thought about that poem for a long time, and she wants a different poem, a newer poem, about the snow. Something after Stevens.

She finds this:

In Whose Unctions
By Greg Glazner

By now the snow is easing
the live nerves of the wire fence
and the firs,
softening the distances it falls through,
laying down a rightness,
as in the spackled whites,
the woodgrains of a room’s hush
before music,
before a lush legato in whose unctions
the excruciations ease,
as in the first
thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods
of the late quartets,
whose dense snow of emotion,
downdrifting,
formal,
whose violins and cellos,
desiring the exhilarations of changes,
turn loose an infusion
of wintry music, all sideslip and immense descent,
repetitions, evolutions
salving down into the still air,
the wound,
the listening.

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The listener in the snow, in the Stevens poem, is “nothing himself,” and “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” So this is a deathly white, a ghost’s stillness, in which even for the non-ghost the blank that underlies the living world exhibits itself when the world is blanketed.

In Glazner’s post-Stevens snow-listening, things are different.

Here rather than nihilism’s exhibitionist, the snow is a balm, an unction, a salving. The snow isn’t the fallen snow of Stevens; it’s snow still falling, making the world whir with motion rather than settling on and crusting the boughs of trees.

And even if this snow does settle, it’s an easing of jangled nerves, a softening, and a rightness, rather than a death revealed.

The poem now begins to explore its rich central simile: The snow is falling

as in the spackled whites,
the woodgrains of a room’s hush
before music,

From exterior to interior, we consider the white flakes inside the grained wood of a music room where a string quartet is about to perform. As the snow “rights” the world, the spackled – repaired – wood, the wood whose gaps have been closed by white spackles, “rights” the room, makes it beautiful, and softens it – diminuendos it – in preparation for the sound about to be made. The snow, like the softened grained wood, is a kind of preconditioning, a preparation of the world for life. The softened world of the music room exists to put into relief

a lush legato in whose unctions
the excruciations ease

The snow eases the

live nerves of the wire fence
and the firs

Our live-wire life, excruciatingly jangly, is soothed and righted by the gorgeous descents of snow and music.

as in the first
thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods
of the late quartets,

Clever, no? The wood of the musical instruments, part of the interior “wood” which is the music room, opens with a lush somewhat harsh sawing, if you will, of the opening notes of, say, Beethoven; though UD is made to think of Jacqueline Du Pre’s Elgar Concerto. The thick heavy profundo from the cello’s wood, not yet part, in these opening notes, of a detectable rhythm, changes us as we listen to it, breaks in a special way the silence of the room. This

dense snow of emotion,
downdrifting,
formal,
whose violins and cellos,
desiring the exhilarations of changes,
turn loose an infusion
of wintry music, [is] all sideslip and immense descent

Now we explicitly draw them together, the snow and the tones, the tones generating a thick, dense covering over of our ordinary jangliness with becalmed snows of emotion (or if you prefer, music hath charms to soothe the savage breast); but doing more than the literal snow because these tones are “formal,” allowing “the exhilarations of changes.” This beautiful sound is

salving down into the still air,
the wound,
the listening.

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This poem reminds me that my favorite poetry collection title is James Merrill’s The Fire Screen, because that’s what art is – the thing we have in order not to perish of the truth, the thing that strategically protects us from the worst even as it finds ways to bring us the worst, or at least to make us feel the furnace blast of the worst. In the Stevens poem you get the truth without shading; in Glazner’s you have the snow screen, the art screen.

It was just a matter of time before Time put this in a headline.

If you didn’t click on the link, here ’tis:

FOOTBALL: A WASTE OF TAXPAYERS’ MONEY

Lordy, lordy. When it hits the headlines of Time!

You, dear taxpayer, are footing the bill for football through an outrageous series of giveaways to billionaire team owners and public universities that put pigskin before sheepskin.

Billionaire team owners like Yeshiva University trustee/convicted fraudster Zygi Wilf… What American could object to handing her taxes over to the likes of Zygi??

Okay, so let’s see what the Time guy has to say.

… Rutgers’ athletics programs get a subsidy from the university of about $29 million a year, the lion’s share of which goes to the Scarlet Knights football team. As the flagship state university of New Jersey, that money is not only coming out of tuition and fees paid by students but out of the pockets of Garden State taxpayers.

As with NFL stadium deals, such lavish, publicly financed gifts are the norm for college football. With the exception of a tiny handful of programs – Ohio State, University of Texas, LSU, and perhaps three or four more – virtually every athletic program at every public NCAA Division I school is subsidized even as administrators plead poverty when it comes to resources for faculty and, as you know, education. Especially in an age of busted government budgets, even the most rabid sports fan should agree that it’s an outrage that the highest-paid public employee in a majority of states is a college football coach (in another 13, it’s a basketball coach). It’s far better to be broke and have a cellar-dwelling NFL franchise, right?

If you watch football this weekend, recognize that most of the drama and meaning is taking place off the field. The way the college and pro games are built on subsidies and giveaways neatly encapsulates crony capitalism at its worst – and helps to explain why taxes go up even as it seems there’s never enough money for basic government functions.

Killjoy. Why not pile it on? Why not talk about Temple? Here’s Deadspin on the subject.

Temple University announced today that it will drop seven intercollegiate sports: baseball, softball, men’s crew, women’s rowing, men’s gymnastics, and men’s track and field, both indoor and outdoor. This is a cautionary tale about trying become a football school.

The cuts will save just $3 million of Temple athletics’ $44 million annual budget, or not much more than it costs to run one of the FBS’s worst football teams (and run it at a loss). About 150 athletes students are out of luck, though the school announced it will honor their scholarships until they graduate or transfer. The nine full-time coaches aren’t so lucky… Rather than drop out of Division 1A, as seemed likely and logical, Temple stayed independent and decided to spend. They moved into an NFL stadium, paying more than $265,000 per home game in rent. They clambered into the MAC, but kept their eyes on a bigger prize. Moderate on-field success spurred further budget inflation. Finally, they made the leap back to the Big East—just as the Big East fell apart… The chase for bigtime football is a pyramid scheme, and the Owls remain afloat at the expense of those sports on the bottom. What happens when the con man runs out of suckers?

They needn’t worry. When it comes to the American taxpayer, there’s a sucker born every minute.

As the New York attorney general’s suit against Trump University proceeds, University Diaries revisits the history of this storied campus.

[T]he New York State Department of Education sent letters to both Trump and [an associate] notifying them that Trump University was in violation of state law by calling itself a “university” when “it was not chartered as such” and because it had not been properly “licensed” by the state.

… Trump University could avoid the “licensure” provision of the state law if it were to re-incorporate outside of New York State and if it ran no physical seminars in the state. But “Trump University failed to abide by any of these conditions,” the attorney general wrote.

[Eric] Schneiderman claims the “university” continued to use 40 Wall Street … as its principal corporate address, including in numerous advertisements. It furthermore conducted “at least fifty live programs in New York between 2006 and 2011.” Schneiderman noted that “Trump University LLC” was finally renamed, on May 20, 2010, “The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC.”

In his deposition [a Trump associate] admitted that the failure to comply with the stipulations was “an oversight” and something he and Trump “forgot” about.

Gordon Gee and West Virginia University!

This seasoned sports slave (who can forget “I just hope the coach doesn’t dismiss me.“?), the man who just missed several mandated sensitivity sessions by the skin of his teeth, will be the next leader of America’s number one party school, a school for whom the term sports-factory really doesn’t go far enough. (Put West Virginia University in my search engine.) A marriage made in hog heaven.

Students – like this one at the University of Maryland – know it. But many can’t stop playing screen games, even in class, so they won’t back a ban.

“Why,” asks this same student, “do professors take this lackadaisical approach when they can ban laptops and get rid of such high levels of distraction altogether?”

Because many professors like what UD has called The Morgue Classroom [scroll down]. A night of the living dead classroom — lights set low, silent students enrapt before screens, professors intoning PowerPoints — this is, let us admit, a beautiful thing, a mystical thing, a floating atmosphere that frees the dreaming mind to roam…

Emily Fish, who calls for the ban, is a freshman at College Park, and, as such, still educable. She can still be brought to feel the dark pull of the new classroom. But there’s undoubtedly a learning curve. Many of the changes occurring in twenty-first century classrooms need to be clarified to students. Think here of the problems Murray Siskind, in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, had with the students in his seminar celebrating the car crash.

“[My students think these more and more massive car crashes in movies] mark the suicide wish of technology. The drive to suicide, the hurtling rush to suicide.”

“What do you say to them?”

“These are mainly B-movies, TV movies, rural drive-in movies. I tell my students not to look for apocalypse in such places. I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old ‘can-do’ spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges. A director says, ‘I need this flatbed truck to do a midair double somersault that produces an orange ball of fire with a thirty-six-foot diameter, which the cinematographer will use to light the scene.’ I tell my students if they want to bring technology into it, they have to take this into account, this tendency toward grandiose deeds, toward pursuing a dream.”

“A dream? How do your students reply?”

“Just the way you did. ‘A dream?’ All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?”

“What about it?” I said.

“I tell them it’s not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It’s a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naivete. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities. My students say, ‘Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs. What kind of innocence is this?'”

“What do you say to that?”

“I tell them they can’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach.”

“Look past the violence.”

“Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

The Morgue Classroom breaks away from complication to make the classroom a chapel of private fantasies – sex fantasies, sports fantasies, gun fantasies, crash fantasies, whatever you seek from the screen.

Perhaps eventually the Morgue Classroom will shake itself awake and morph into something like a circle jerk. But that’s probably not for a few more years.

Violence on-field and off. What more could you ask for from a university?

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

… an onion, with layer upon layer…”

And it ain’t just the Torah, as the ultra-orthodox of Israel have discovered.

An ad agency put a billboard up in their neighborhood; the billboard promoted awareness of violence against women.

On that billboard, the agency put the photograph of a woman.

They did this knowing that the nice people in that neighborhood would immediately walk over to the billboard and rip the image of the woman to shreds.

But these men are Torah scholars! These men must know about the onion!

Less than 24 hours after the poster went up, just as [the ad agency] had predicted, the face of the woman in the poster was ripped off … revealing a message that read, “International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women 25.11.03.”

Not to worry, though. I’m sure the haredim will set fires under what remains of the billboard.

[The University of Alabama’s] athletic department gave $6.8 million back to the school’s academic side for 2011-12, according to a university spokesperson. Len Elmore, an attorney, a basketball analyst and a member of the Knight Commission, scoffed at that number.

“What did Alabama generate in revenue with football — $60 million, $70 million, $80 million?” he asked. “So they gave back less than 10 percent?”

… academic vs. athletics spending at American universities.

A newspaper in Alabama has wasted no time in noting that, for instance, “[University of Alabama Birmingham] spent less per student on academics in 2011 than four years earlier, [while its] athletic spending rate per athlete increased 30 percent.”

Hyuk. That’s how y’all stay Alabam’.

And, uh, at least it’s money well spent!

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Even when not factoring in athletic scholarship costs, a pricey category for schools that can rapidly increase, the athletic spending rate was still higher than academic spending. A big factor was the growth in coaching salaries, which increased on average by 54 percent among the five major conferences, compared to 24 percent for all FBS schools.

The database defines academic spending per student as direct and indirect costs associated to educating students. Examples include expenses for instruction, department research, student services, and a portion of academic, institutional and operations support. It does not include spending related to other university activities.

… the Kennedy Center Honors and Christmas in Washington. She’s part of a chorus backing up various performers at both events. And, as ever, UD will provide breathless commentary on her kid’s experiences of rehearsals and events.

Here she is in 2009, showing up at 1:48 (long blond hair, glasses), backing up Sting as he honors Bruce Springsteen.

(I already know who she’s singing with, and who this performer is honoring, at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, but I’m not allowed to say.)

West Virginia’s national image is shaped more by [West Virginia University’s] football program than anything else. One of my long-time traditions is to take an annual vacation in Las Vegas. For years, if I wore a West Virginia hat or other garb, I’d be greeted with “You guys are good” … During a recent trip, the comments were a virtually unanimous: “You guys are no good.”

There’s no retort to that. They’re right.