'When I began my undergraduate career at Harvard a little over two years ago, I spent the early days, weeks, and months floating around in a haze. I felt out to sea in my classes, and socially, the scene surprised me. I had expected Harvard to be an oasis of intellectualism, and it wasn’t. [In a haze, out to sea, an oasis... We've got a mess of metaphors here. But the first-person approach is a good idea, and this Harvard undergraduate writing in the campus newspaper is about to say something very important, and say it pretty well.]

To some degree, this lack of intellectualism was a relief: It meant that I didn’t have to worry so much about whether people considered me an intellectual powerhouse, because they weren’t intellectual powerhouses either. It was a shame so few of them read [Note: This is a current Harvard undergraduate talking about the reading habits of others like her. Many do not read... Which can't really be true. But many probably read very little.] and so few of them cared about the happenings of the world [Weak phrase, happenings of the world. Vague. Global events, for instance, might be better.], but at least I felt less guilty when I spent more time freshman year surfing Facebook than thinking about art or culture or politics.

And though I would come to get used to this aspect [grow accustomed would be more elegant.] of the Harvard landscape (and discover microcosms of intellectualism on campus), the pervasive apathy still troubles me. The ability to engage with the world in a multifaceted way, to employ the approach of liberal arts, and to absorb and apply new knowledge over the course of a lifetime is an essential part of being an intelligent and worthwhile person. [This writing is weak, but describing the nature and value of intellectuality is very difficult.] If Harvard, an apex of higher learning, does not hold the pursuit of intellectualism as a central value, then can any other place be expected to?

The phenomenon may have to do with the college admissions game that has reached maniac-scale intensity [maniac-intensity would be better.]. According to a 2000 College Board report, between 1994 and 1999, the number of first-year students in American universities grew by 200,000. In part, this owes to [owes to is awkward] an expanding demographic, Generation Y. Combined with better recruiting by colleges and programs such as the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI), winning a spot at Harvard (or Yale or any other top college) has become a considerable feat. The cause of Harvard’s intellectual decline in this period of hyper-competitiveness is two-pronged: It has to do with the transformation of the college student makeup, as well as the growing college preparatory hysteria.

The first part of this lack is due in part to something that is quite good about Harvard: the place is no longer a rich, white boys’ club. Harvard, in the trend of colleges nationally, is increasingly diverse, particularly socioeconomically. [Four is's in two sentences. Let's see how we can avoid them.... An easy initial move: Get rid of that is. Just drop it and read the phrase without it: ...something quite good about Harvard. Much better. Okay. Let's go back and look at the first is. How about This lack stems from? So now we've got This lack stems from something quite good about Harvard. Let's keep our third is in: the place is no longer, etc. As for our final is, I propose radical surgery: Drop the sentence altogether. The sentence right after this one carries the substance of the point.] Thanks to programs such as HFAI, Harvard draws from a much wider cross-section of applicants than it once did.

But this unquestionable benefit has had negative side effects [Drop side.]. With an influx of students from for whom a major draw is post-college career success and earning potential, there will naturally be less emphasis on the “frivolous” pursuits of the liberal arts and more on activities and areas of study that are distinctly pre-professional. [See that that are toward the end of the sentence? Just as with that is before, drop it and read the phrase: activities and areas of study distinctly pre-professional. Get it? Wordy writing is in part about sticking in unnecessary little phrases like these.] Though of course there are exceptions, this culture increasingly pervades campus. This is why there has been a surge of campus business groups, and so-called “leadership” organizations. This is evident, too, in the rise in number of concentrators in areas such as economics, which serves for many as a pre-business track. [The last two sentences both begin with the sometimes confusing and often dull phrase This is. Go back and find the heart of these sentences - campus business groups, economics concentrators -- that's where you should find their first words.] A Crimson survey of the Class of 2007 found that more than 60 percent of those entering the workforce were pursuing jobs in finance. [Too ingy. Rewrite: pursued jobs in finance.]

On the flipside, the intellectual’s status as an endangered species is also caused by a sort of leisure class mania. [To be verb plus passive voice. Rewrite: Leisure class mania also contributes to the intellectual's endangered status.] In this atmosphere of intense competition, the college admissions game has been transformed into an industry. Students are sent off to preparatory programs, and their parents drop thousands of dollars on private SAT tutors and college consultants. Ivywise, a New York-based college consulting firm, charges anywhere from $1,000 for a one-time consultation to $30,000 for a two-year 100-hour program. The company promises pleasing results: 75 percent of its clients go on to attend Ivy League colleges. Ivywise provides a slew of standard services like scheduling students’ testing dates and summer programs and editing admissions essays. But some of the firm’s offerings are a bit unsettling: One Ivywise package promises to “identify the student’s passions and interests.” A teenager, we gather, couldn’t possibly figure out his interests on his own. At least, he couldn’t possibly pinpoint which “passions” would win him a spot at a top college. [Fine writing throughout, but drop quotation marks around last use of word passions.]

When it comes to the college admissions process, vigor is hardly a virtue. The modern child may be a whiz at excelling in [drop at excelling] his courses and extracurriculars, but this does not make him capable of intellectualism. His schedule is jam-packed with all the stuff his hovering helicopter parents and college consultants have picked out for him. He learns the ways of networking and time management, not the ways of devouring a poem or pondering life’s great questions.

Upon arrival at Harvard, many of these students are not so sure why they’re here. Some burn out completely — free from the watchful eyes of mother and father, they stop attending classes and flop as students. But most of them simply don’t get what they should be getting out of college — the rigorous pursuit of liberal arts — because they can’t escape the résumé padding of their earlier years. They continue to take courses they’re not really interested in and they participate in activities they find dull because these are the ways to land jobs at Goldman Sachs & Co.

Though the Harvard of 2007 is a progressive and admirable institution, something has been lost. We’ve mistaken grades, test scores, meaningless extracurriculars, and our college admission as a collective barometer for the successful young person. These are components of personal success, but they are irrelevant if, as individuals, we are deficient in intellectual depth. Only when we recognize (and change) this, will we be able to get something worthwhile out of college.'

Labels: SOS

'I have sat quietly by reading the headlines and editorials about Glenn Poshard, a dizzying roller coaster ride that made me wish I had skipped the chili dog. [A quiet, dizzying roller coaster ride. Confusing.] He devoted his life to serving people of Southern Illinois and is charismatic, enthusiastic and dedicated to his community. [You can be many good things and a plagiarist too.]

I watched him dancing on the sidewalk in Carbondale's Town Square last December, bobbing along to the music of the middle school marching band with his grandson, Tucker, on his shoulders. It was anybody's call as to which of them were having the better time at the annual Lights Parade. He is genuine and caring. [This kitschy description intends to bring a tear to the eye. But you can bob along to the beat, have a grandson with a cute name, and still plagiarize.]

You can hear it in the squeals of laughter of his grandson. [How much, really, can we conclude from this laughter? Hitler made toddlers laugh at Nuremburg, you know...] And if that's not enough, you can read it in his public record.

How is it that a self-appointed, nameless band of plagiarism vigilantes can tear apart a man's career, family and reputation? [John Wayne talk.] The accusations don't have to be true to be damaging. Just because he's accused doesn't make him guilty.

Tossing out a lifetime of stellar public service over a passage written years ago is incomprehensible. At minimum, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Until the hooded, neo-Nazi, Klansmen of plagiarism snuff out their burning torches and find something better to do there will be no peace. Show us your faces so that we may level the playing field and scare up the skeletons in your dark closets. [Skeletal masked closeted torch-bearing fascists cavort on tilted fields.]

We can look Glenn Poshard in the eye. But we cannot see in yours.'

Labels: SOS

'With some trepidation, I venture a few thoughts on the controversy over residence-hall programs at the University of Delaware. Trepidation because the kind of position I take on these issues is increasingly wearisome to hold given the polarization in online discussions of academia. [UD is not at all sure she sees the polarization. I don't see anyone out there - online or off - defending programs like Delaware's. Quite a number of these programs, for students, and sometimes for faculty, poke their heads out, attract enough outrage to appear in the press, and then, in seconds, get killed. I don't read anyone, left, right, or center, mourning their passing. It's too easy for Tim to begin his remarks with a gesture of despair about academic polarization, as if there's no common ground. There's common ground, and it's clear right there in the comment thread on Tim's blog. He has plenty in common with commenters to his right, like withywindle.] but I wish I could write in a looser, more enjoyably idiosyncratic, more compelling way about these questions like Oso Raro, but I’ve made my rhetorical bed and I’m stuck with it.

Before I try to stick any kind of proportionality or nuance into the discussion, one thing should be clear: the program at Delaware as described in the press is just plain wrong, and that’s even if the press description is exaggerated or out of context in some respect. Even if the content of the program weren’t simple-minded and reductive (which it is), doing it as a mandatory institutional program in residence-halls is a big mistake. I’m not sure there’s anything that’s appropriate to that context beyond making sure people know how to evacuate in a fire and communicating basic institutional safety policies (such as no fire sources in rooms). The moment you mandate that all students receive safe-sex tutorials or drug and alcohol abuse prevention training, you’ve exposed the institution to in loco parentis, and where’s that going to stop? [Absolutely correct, and an important point. Imagine if GWU, UD's institution, mandated anti-anti-semitic sessions in response to scrawled swastikas around campus which now turn out -- most or all of them -- to have been a hoax invented by an attention-seeking freshman.] Moreover, if you’re going to ennumerate the “rights and responsibilities” of people living in university housing, you’ve got to include much more forcefully that you have the right to think whatever you want – including to question some of the precepts and approaches of diversity training. (The document does say you have the choice to “stand up for yourself and others and speak up for what you believe has value”, but in context, that seems to mean only that you are encouraged to defend an active commitment to diversity.)



But ok. How to move beyond simple sputtering outrage at the supposed dominance of political correctness [Again, I don't see the sputtering. I see the outrage, and I applaud it. Outrage can catalyze you to act against injustice. How many Delawaresque programs are still lobotomizing students because students aren't strong and clear enough about their speech and privacy rights to protest?], leftist academics or whatever boogeyman is the label of choice in this round of postings?

The first bit of proportionality I’d interject is to look at the source of some simple-minded kinds of political and institutional misbehavior. In this case, I’m guessing that activist students are at least part of where this program is coming from, probably working with a residential administrator or dean who has a hard time thinking beyond dogma.

I’m going to be a bit condescending here, but students are students, and they make mistakes because they’re still learning, whether they’re left-wing activists or intensely single-minded premeds. [Again, this is an important point. Many students are supercharged with responsiveness to perceived injustices, and yet they're still young. This combination can create serious programmatic errors.] That’s what they are in college to do. Residential colleges sell themselves precisely on the point that some learning takes place outside of the classroom through extracurricular activities, social life and so on. Students with strong political or philosophical views naturally turn to their own educational institution to explore how to make those views real or powerful or transformative. Americans who were in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s couldn’t do much to directly touch South Africa, so we tried to figure out how to mobilize our own institutions to touch South Africa, however indirectly. I have to admit, looking back, that many of us understood very little about how divestment might concretely function, or about the costs and risks we were asking our institutions to incur. But partly I got a better understanding of both of those things by being involved, an understanding I don’t think I could have gotten just by studying in a classroom. I learned about a lot of the shortcomings of activism by being active.

In other cases, some of these kinds of commitments come from individual faculty or administrators that I wouldn’t hesitate to call simple-minded hacks. (That, readers of this blog might recall, was my first and primary comment on Ward Churchill: whatever else the guy was or did, he was a third-rate hack.) [This is a crucial point, and one that I don't think Tim does enough with. Universities may have in them administrators who think all day about making already culturally competent people culturally competent, through activities that skirt or simply are indoctrination. UD sees these administrators as the enemies of the piece.]

The valid issue in that case is then, “Why allow such extensive access to institutional programs and policy to either inexperienced activists or hacks, then?” Yup, that’s an issue, and it’s well worth exploring a bit more.



In many such cases, it’s not that political projects coming from a group of activist students or from a few activist administrators or faculty members are deeply shared in a consensual way by a large majority of institutional actors and thus become institutional projects by general acclaim. [Too true. Most academics are appalled at the vulgarity of thought and behavior associated with these sorts of activists. That's why I said above that Tim overestimates the degree of polarization among academics.] It’s more that the autonomy and decentralization of academic life which most of us cherish creates a complicated burden when it comes to blocking somebody else’s pet obsessions or commitments. [Yes. Another crucial point. UD would never want to restrict that autonomy. But it's the gradual centralization of authority over matters of social thought and behavior on campus into the hands of diversity appointments that often instigates the scandals.]

Suppose I see a group of students campaigning to get the institution to commit to some political objective that I think is unwise or simplistic in some respect. I don’t quite want to rise to block that on the grounds that anything and everything which is “political” is wrong because that can lead to some truly silly conclusions. I’m interested in the political commitments of the Free Culture movement – but quite beyond that movement’s specific views, it seems obvious to me that intellectual property policy, open-source publishing and so on are intimately relevant to the everyday business of scholars, librarians, and teachers. I’m not wild about some of the rhetoric and unexamined premises associated with demands for universities to have sustainability policies, but it would be silly to rule all of that out of bounds because it’s “political” – environmental sustainability might turn out to lead to some good economic outcomes for an institution, like reducing energy usage, but it’s also a legitimate claim on some level about what an institution can or should do in the world. [The problem with this example is that it doesn't share the intimately mind-penetrating character of diversity training. No one's going to call you a racist because you take a certain position on energy use.] Hell, devoting a big proportion of a college curriculum to studying “the Great Books” is political in some fashion. [Having stretched things too far in his first example, Tim now stretches them to tatters. The basic distinction between selfless intellectual activity with texts -- the foundational, definitive activity of universities -- and self-obsessed personal identity politics in the hands of doctrinaire trainers couldn't be clearer. There may be political as well as intellectual grounds for Great Books choices, but these choices, their justification, and their incorporation into a curriculum, are in an entirely different moral and institutional universe from the fucking with people's heads that is diversity training at its worst, as at Delaware.] You can’t oppose a political argument about institutional politics on the grounds that you yourself are too fastidious to ever be political, because it won’t take long before you’re hoist on the same petard.

So I’d have to take any case of activist demand as it comes. Now what? Well, if it’s students, I honestly don’t want to spend my life running around squashing any student political project I have a disagreement with. That’s not my job. In fact, it’s the opposite of my job: it’s being an anti-teacher, an authoritarian, misusing my power. If it’s a hack on the faculty or the administration? In self-interested terms, I honestly have to weigh whether it’s worth tangling with the person openly, about what kinds of hassles that person can visit upon me in retaliation.

In either case, there’s also a question of the consequence of being a crusader on every single issue where some other institutional actor has what I think is a bad idea. It’s one thing to block or criticize a proposal for institutionalization of a political project when it crosses my desk naturally: when faculty are asked by central administration for feedback, when it comes to the floor of a general meeting, when I’m sitting in a committee devoted to a particular kind of issue, when students or colleagues ask my opinion, when it’s an issue that’s known to be near and dear to my heart because of my specialized areas of knowledge. Or just when I have the time and the energy to compose a blog post, which has a very gentle impact on most issues. For example, some years back, some students here wanted an Ethnic Studies program. I thought (and still think) that was a bad idea for some very simple, non-political reasons (duplication of programs, greater demands on already over-extended faculty, no resources for new faculty lines, weakness of our institutional model for interdisciplinary programs) and some “political” reasons as well (I simply think Ethnic Studies is a bad way to organize the study of many very important and legitimate topics). This was a case where it made sense for me to be in the conversation because what I do was directly relevant to what the students wanted to do.

If you insist on being actively involved every single time someone else in your institution is doing something objectionable, you will almost certainly devolve into being a crank and an asshole. You can’t do that and not become tendentious and self-absorbed, that kind of omnipresent involvement is intrinsically narcissistic. At some point, it inevitably is going to affect how well you do the job that you’ve been hired to do, because there are only so many hours in the day. If you’re always at committee meetings, protest gatherings, scribbling furious emails, poking into dark corners with a cattle prod, then you’re not in the classroom or the library or the lab.

What some people settle for is splitting the difference: being furious at everything but not having the time to be involved with changing any outcomes through direct time-consuming involvement in deliberative process, through painstaking efforts to persuade others. [A lot of these important observations pertain to the scandal of bigtime university sports. Faculty understandably don't want to deal with it.] When you arrive at that point, you have no hope to change any outcome whether you’re coming to meetings or not, because you’ve got no persuasive tools left to you. You started by rolling your eyes derisively in a wholly justifiable way at the excesses of others (probably in concert with the majority of your colleagues) but now you’re the one everyone rolls their eyes at. You’re not connected to anything, not sympathetic to anybody else’s projects, not discriminate in what fights you pick or when you pick them. You’ve got nothing left to help you judge when the stakes are high and when they’re low: your institutional profile is “junkyard dog”, biting and howling at everything.

So sometimes dumb ideas and fringe political visions are going to become institutional projects because the sensible middle is mutually and simultaneously trying to avoid being drawn into this kind of indiscriminate misanthropy. Sometimes hacks and sweetly well-meaning but naive activists are actually pretty savvy about this aspect of institutional life, and know how to muscle something in under the radar, how to keep from triggering a major deliberative process where they’ll get blocked.

That’s one context to keep in mind. Another is that some ideas only become wrong when they’re simplistically truncated so that they can become institutional programs and policies, but that the precursor concepts, ideas and insights are something else entirely. And also that some institutional projects may eventually take a wrong turn on some smaller point, but are basically well-meaning, serious attempts to deal with genuine issues and problems. Diversity is a real question, in many ways, and it’s worth thinking about how to institutionally work towards it.

For example, with the Delaware residential life program, there’s nothing wrong per se with asking straights when they first realized their orientation or when they came out as straights. [There's everything wrong with it. It's nobody's institutional business what my private self-conception may be. Nor does straight/gay as a dichotomy, or "orientation" as descriptive of anything remotely true about my existential experience, make sense to me.] That is, nothing wrong if that’s a sly or mischievious [sp?] aside in a personal conversation about sexuality, or a subversive question directed at a public figure who is intensely anti-gay, or as a way in an intellectual discussion about the history of sexuality to illustrate what the ten-dollar word “heteronormativity” actually means. Turning the question into a set part of a pseudo-mandatory workshop (there’s some confusion at Delaware about how strongly students are encouraged to attend) takes everything valuable out of it. It turns something sly into dogma. [That shit's as sly as Sly Stallone, Tim. It ain't sly.]

Or take the assertion in one of the training documents for the Delaware workshops that all white Americans are racists because they are socialized to a racial identity associated with privilege. Put it that way and it’s crude. Put it in a workshop as an assertion of empirical fact as opposed to a tendentious argument with a pile of priors a hundred miles high sitting on it and you’ve just sailed off the edge of stupid. [No, you're still anchored at stupid.] In part precisely because accusations of racism are taken more seriously in early 21st Century American life than they were in 1960, you can’t casually scale from a general description of the consequences of a social identity to a highly personalized accusation unless you want those accused to treat the idea of racism as trivially generalized and meaningless.

But there are complex questions and debates to be explored about how historically-produced identities structure everyday psychological experience, social organization, and so on. There is an interesting scholarly literature on the history of whiteness. And so on. Part of the problem for me is that some of the people who react negatively to something like this program at Delaware act as if the deeper, more complex, more interesting scholarly debates and discussions are equally risible and discardable, but somehow we never really get around to that kind of conversation. [This is unfair as a description of most people interested in the matter. It's precisely because many scholars take seriously the intricacy and importance of these subjects that their outrage flashes out when activists beshit them.] We get stuck with the hacks and the polemicists. We talk endlessly, oh so endlessly, about Ward Churchill etcetera. We never get to the really deep literature on Native American history that might come to some vaguely similar moral conclusions as Churchill but in much more subtle and nuanced ways. [How does a serious scholar get vaguely near the moral conviction that white people deserved to die in the Towers?] We don’t get to talk about David Roediger or Noel Ignatieff on whiteness, or a huge complex well-researched literature on the history of racial identity in the United States as a whole.

When I say talk, I mean it. I don’t agree necessarily with Roediger and Ignatieff, particularly in terms of the way they read off the history of whiteness to a contemporary political praxis. I tend to come at a lot of the history of identity and the politics connected to that history the way that Anthony Appiah does in some of his recent work, as a skeptic. But Appiah’s work is a million miles away from quick dismissals of “political correctness” that are meant to encompass both superficial institutional projects and detailed monographs written in good faith and with serious craft. At some point, if we’re going to still have anything resembling scholarship left in the smoking ruins of culture war [This language takes us back to Tim's first paragraph. As cultural description, it is unconvincing.], some of the critics need to stir themselves and respond like scholars to tough, nuanced, challenging work rather than continuously dwell on how the hacks have been parasitically turning that work into slogans and screeds.'

Labels: SOS

'Among the many works of art hanging in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts’ atrium, Nantucket artist and SMFA alum Joan Albaugh’s oil paintings were part of a sea of canvases. [Awkward first sentence Her works were among many; her works were part of a sea... The feel of this is redundant. Circular.]

Touted as the largest public art sale in New England, with 4,000 original works and prints from 800 artists, the 26th annual School of the Museum of Fine Arts December sale kicked off last night with a celebration off Boston’s Fenway. The sale features work from students, faculty, alumni and other artists affiliated with the school. [Transition from first to second paragraph murky.]

Albaugh, a 1981 graduate of the SMFA, is known for painting houses without windows.

“I don’t like getting caught up in the details of a house,” Albaugh said last week. Winter light on the island also contributed to the conception of the windowless dwellings.

“The light’s so bright on a house it obliterates the windows,” she said.

At the SMFA, Albaugh studied with professors Barney Rubenstein and Henry Schwartz, in critique classes. She eventually moved to New York, and was living in Jersey City when she decided to move to the island in 1994, to start her son, now Nantucket High School Junior Jack Muhlkern, in preschool.

Albaugh travels often, she said, and each of her house portraits start [Should be starts.] as a real place. Later, she plays with the composition, taking off dormers and restructuring as she goes. She’s attracted to baron landscapes, she said. [Unless the writer means -- seems unlikely -- she's attracted to baronial spreads, I think he means barren.]

“It kind of goes with the idea of isolation,” she said.

This December sale is Albaugh’s second.


Last week, SMFA curator Joanna Soltan [Same last name as UD!], put final touches on the show, as others gave preview tours of the work to patrons. Soltan, who hung the show over the past month with the help of a team of 20 or so, is in her fifth year as curator.

“I knew the space very well so I know where I want to plan the layout,” Soltan said, in her present but not overbearing Polish accent [Polish accent? Mr. UD's Polish too!] [Present but not overbearing? Perhaps the writer meant to say pleasant but not overbearing...], regarding the positioning of the exhibition walls in the SMFA’s Anderson Hall. Under 30-foot ceilings, the space in between the walls is occupied with bins and bins of unframed work, mostly from SMFA students.

Soltan oversaw the drop-off period in early November, three days in which the students, alumni, school faculty and affiliated artists participating in the show could drop off up to 10 pieces.

Soltan then worked to hang at least one piece from each artist each artist [Typo.]. After the show starts, Soltan and company rotate the work, giving pieces several hours of wall time before taking them down.

“We never get bored,” Soltan said. “For us too, it’s like a new way to see something.” [Curious that like many of the other Soltans UD's related to, this one lives in Boston and works in the arts... Wait a minute! Joanna Soltan is Mr. UD's sister! That makes her UD's sister-in-law.]

Around the school, next to some of the work, were place [placed] these blue and gold medallion-like stickers. These denote the favorite works of this year’s art luminaries – Boston area reporters, personalities and curators – asked to share their opinions.


... The SMFA December Sale is open from 12-8 p.m. Thursday, and from 12-6 p.m. Friday through Monday in the first floor of the school, located at 230 The Fenway in Boston, next to the MFA.'

Labels: SOS

'I see why a contribution to, say, the Salvation Army should be eligible for a charitable deduction. It helps the poor. But why, exactly, should a contribution to the already extraordinarily wealthy Guggenheim Museum or to Harvard University (which already has an endowment of more than $30 billion)?

Awhile ago, New York's Lincoln Center had a gala supported by the charitable contributions of hedge-fund industry leaders, some of whom take home $1 billion a year. I may be missing something, but this doesn't strike me as charity. ...

It turns out that only an estimated 10% of all charitable deductions are directed at the poor. So here's a modest proposal. At a time when the number of needy continues to rise, when government doesn't have the money to do what's necessary for them and when America's very rich are richer than ever, we should revise the tax code: Focus the charitable deduction on real charities.

If the donation goes to an institution or agency set up to help the poor, the donor gets a full deduction. If the donation goes somewhere else -- to an art palace, a university, a symphony or any other nonprofit -- the donor gets to deduct only half of the contribution.'

'The business of philanthropy and the purposes of fund raising — a $200 billion annual marketplace of givers and receivers — are complex. [Beware of people who begin arguing by announcing the immense complexity of their issue... an immensity only insiders can understand. This comes across as hocus-pocus stuff -- I'm not going to argue against my opponents on the merits; I'm going to insist that they -- and you, the reader -- can't hope to understand the mystical intricacies of my field. This approach is a dud on many levels, but mainly it's a dud because it's condescending.] That's why it's easy for casual observers to mistake generosity for self-interest. [Reich says nothing about the motives of the givers. He talks only about definitions of true charity, and about fair distribution.]

Robert B. Reich made that mistake in his recent Outlook column ("Harvard effect/ When charity really isn't ... ," Oct. 21) where he argued that we have entered what might be characterized as an era of Philanthropic Darwinism, a time when big donors give to bigger and bigger arts and education institutions, all designed — in his mind — to promote a wealthy lifestyle and a hefty tax deduction. So, he would cut in half donors' charitable tax deduction for gifts to the arts and universities because they do not meet his definition of worthy, i.e., helping the poor. [It's not only Reich's definition. Giving to universities and concert halls is not direct charitable aid to the poor.]

I know there are arts organizations and patrons who can make an argument for the positive impact they have on society. [positive impact they have on society is dead language. And the deadness, in the context of this argument, is no mere stylistic matter. If this is the best the writer can do by way of describing the charitable value of the arts, the reader's suspicion that Reich's right only grows.] So, I want to concentrate on the darts he threw at the university world, as he has me seething at his fund-raising fumble. [Okay. If you've been reading SOS for any length of time, you know exactly what she's going to throw darts at here. Yes. Seething. I'm seething! I'm at the boiling point! Hold me back! ... Talking about how damn mad you are is an argument-killer. All you're really doing is showing off what you take to be your moral superiority -- I mean, I'm so ethical, my heart bleeds so for the poor, that I can't control my rage when know-nothings like Reich run their mouths... This sort of thing makes the reader distrust and dislike you. You can't control your emotions. You flatter yourself that you're better than other people. Plus -- see dud approach #1 -- you think you know more than other people.]

Education is the best way, bar none, for people to move up the economic and social ladder. In the 1950s, the GI Bill made education possible for the middle class. Today, it is private citizens, corporations and foundations whose generosity supports tens of thousands of first-generation college students and gives them and their families tools and hope for the future. [Cliche-ridden language throughout, and forgets to mention that it's still overwhelmingly the government that helps out universities.]

Let's look at the University of Houston and what increased philanthropy means to Houston's university.

We are definitely not the ivy-covered palace Reich imagines all universities to be. [At no point does Reich say all universities are Harvard.] This university attracts a large percentage of students who are the first in their families to attend college, so we need scholarships by the barrelful.

No young person should have to drop out of college for lack of funds. More than two-thirds of UH students receive some form of financial aid, but primarily in the form of loans that create a huge financial burden that may take years to repay. Private scholarships make the real difference in getting these students through graduation to become part of the educated workforce needed by Houston industry. That doesn't sound elite to me.

UH must pursue philanthropic gifts for endowed chairs and professorships to recruit and retain the intellectual firepower that will attract bright new students, federal grant support and help create economic prosperity for the nation's fourth-largest city.

And we must build this campus anew because UH is full of young scientists, budding artists and students crowded together elbow to elbow. Our research facilities house faculty aching for the tools and space they must have to apply for and fulfill the requirements of federal grants.

The Moores School of Music is bursting at the seams with too many students and not enough rehearsal space. The Bauer College of Business is exploding with students seeking that old fashioned thing called a job. [that old fashioned thing... Hard to get a grip on his tone in this piece. Indignant, yes. But is he being sarcastic here? Not clear.] We simply need more classroom buildings and more labs.

Today UH has the largest space deficit of all universities in the state, and that's just to serve our current students. So we seek philanthropic support for the buildings this campus must have to stand tall for a new generation of Houstonians. We're not building a palace, Mr. Reich; we're building an ark of economic opportunity. [Again, a strange sort of argument that misreads what Reich says and then attacks him frontally like this. The whole Mr. Reich thing is just weird.] And if philanthropy can help us achieve flagship university status in Texas, then it will be money well spent.

This year, the UH System received $54.3 million from generous contributors, a 37 percent increase over the previous year.

That's just the start. We want our philanthropic intent to be clear. The University of Houston is not seeking to raise more and more money just to build a big reserve. We want to make our case to our alumni, friends and donors that we seek to raise the philanthropic resources that will build a truly great University — one that Houston can be proud to call its flagship public university.

And that Mr. Reich, is the true purpose of philanthropy and the impact it will have on the future for all of us — colleges and universities, art museums and ballet companies. We are all 100 percent tax deductible and a bargain indeed for Houston and the nation. [Essentially, this piece comes across to UD as cynical. The writer isn't really engaging Reich. He's using the occasion of Reich having written about giving to universities in order to remind the newspaper's readers that they should give to his university.]'

Labels: SOS

'Just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into World War II, Utah State made its own kind of history.

The Aggies lost their final game of the 1941 season and finished 0-8.

It was Utah State's first winless season of more than four games and it was the last time the Aggies ended a season without a victory. Sixty-six years later, the Aggies find themselves in a down-to-the-wire struggle to avoid making the wrong kind of history.

Heading into Saturday's game at heavily favored Fresno State, Utah State is 0-8. With four games remaining - three on the road and one at home against nationally ranked Boise State - the Aggies' prospects for victory are grim. [As grim as Pearl Harbor.]



"Life is hard. This is hard, and why we're being tested like this, I wish I had the answer for you," said coach Brent Guy said [Typo there. Extra "said."], trying to remain optimistic. "But we've had a lot of opportunities to win games this season. We've been close. Now, we've got to complete one and we have to do it fast."

This season, Utah State has led four times in the fourth quarter, only to lose in the closing minutes to UNLV (23-16), Wyoming (32-18), San Jose State (23-20) and Nevada (31-28).

Still, the Aggies have lost 14 straight games, going back to 2006. They have lost 25 of their past 27 games, including 12 straight on the road and 10 straight within the Western Athletic Conference.

It's been a grinding stretch that has tested every player and coach who has been part of each defeat - close or otherwise.

"I'm generally an upbeat kind of guy - not much brings me down," said senior fullback-tight end Jimmy Bohm. "[So] keeping guys mentally excited about the game, that's what [the] seniors and leaders of the team are trying to do."

Said Guy: "I'm really, really proud of this group of seniors. These are the guys I inherited - that were here when I got here, guys that could have gone somewhere else. One left, but the rest stayed. I think that's a credit to them and why this team is still really fun to coach."



Fun?

"You can tell by the way they practice that they are still trying very hard," Guy said. "They chirp around and they laugh with each other, Not that that's the way you want to actually practice [N of Not shouldn't be capitalized.]. But they don't come out with 0-8 hanging over their head. They come out with, 'OK, how can we win the next game? What do we have to do?' That's encouraging to me."

This season to forget continues a long stretch of futility for Utah State, which hasn't won as many as four games since 2002 and hasn't enjoyed a .500 season since 1997. [The team's graduation rate is 54%.]



"To break a losing tradition is tough," said Keith Henschen, a University of Utah sports psychologist. "You almost have to start over because people actually start believing they are going to lose. Not consciously, but subconsciously." [Henschen elsewhere argues that "many teams go through four identifiable stages of performance development – forming, storming, norming and performing."]



Utah State started over by hiring Guy in 2004. He was the Aggies' fifth head coach since 1992.

"A problem at Utah State is that it has been a stepping stone for coaches," Henschen said. "There has been very little continuity and, as a result, very little accountability regarding what is expected." [Bet grabbing and tossing all those coaches has cost the university quite a lot of money. In university football, long stretches of futility tend to be expensive.]

Besides the coaching turnover, Henschen blames the losing environment on the Aggies' tradition of playing two or three "money" games every season - games they have little chance of winning but results in a huge payday for the athletic program.

"By overscheduling, they keep beating their kids down - physically and mentally," he said. "I feel sorry for them. Why do they keep doing that? . . . It just feeds into a situation where everybody involved starts thinking, 'We can't win.' It definitely becomes a psychological situation." [Keith, you have a PED degree, which SOS takes to be a Physical Education Doctorate. Surely you understand the money game.]



Guy seems to understand, saying the hardest thing about the ongoing losing streak is "the emotional toll - the toll you try to keep off the kids. It's a tremendous burden for them because they continually get asked about it and continually have to answer for it."

Of course, it happens at other schools. [Of course. We're not the only ones, you know...]

Three years ago, New Mexico State went 0-12 under coach Hal Mumme.

"The toughest thing is getting the players to believe in what you're doing," he said."It's almost a player-by-player thing and it's very difficult to do."

This season, Idaho is 1-8 under first-year coach Robb Akey.

"When the losses start mounting up, it gets a little heavy," he said. "That's a battle we fight every week. What I'm trying to do is point out the positive things and show them, when we do it together, it works."

At this point, Guy believes his players might be too aware of the losing streak and are not focused on enjoying the game.'

Labels: SOS

'Philosophy majors are notorious for being perpetually stoned, easy-going hippies. [I'd drop notorious for being.] They can be found in yoga class, at a NORML meeting or at a party trying to convince a bored sorority girl that the world is really nothing but the dream of a hamster named Fred. [End of sentence great: hamster named Fred is fun. But can be found is a bit clunky. How about Look for them in... And rather than trying to convince I'd simply write telling. I'd also drop is really nothing but and replace it with the world's the dream of a hamster named Fred. Notice the way my edits are about making things snappier, shorter, stronger, more direct.] However, there exists a lesser-known species of philosophy majors. [There exists is okay, because she's trying here for a certain pretentious intellectual formulation.] This minority consists of chain-smoking, coffee-consuming, Friedrich Nietzsche-worshipping emo kids. [Excellent.]

If you have ever been shaken out of your Sudoku-induced trance [I'd drop induced.] by the kid wearing black in the back of the class answering a professor’s question in an inappropriately deep fashion [Drop inappropriately.], you have probably encountered this lesser-known type of philosophy student. No question is too mundane. It could be an innocent rhetorical question such as, “How is everyone doing today?” Instead of joining the chorus of droning “Gooood,” from the class [The two of's are awkward; the joining and droning are too ingy. The sentence is wordy.], they volunteer the answer: “Considering the limitations of the human sense of perception, we can never know anything for sure. I do not even know for certain I exist. So how am I supposed to know how I’m doing? Why would you ask that? Whhhhy?” [Drop the final Whhhy. Too cute.]

For these lovers of knowledge, philosophy is a way of life. Spurning physical activity and rowdy social gatherings, emo philosophers can instead [Drop instead.] be found outside of coffee shops drinking coffee (black) and smoking cigarettes. [Unfiltered in parenthesis after cigarettes would be fun, and would give the sentence balance.] They will inevitably [Drop inevitably.] be reading an obscure philosophical text, or if with a partner, discussing the dark existential truths of life. [Simply dark existential truths would be better. Truths is a stronger word to end on.] Also, due to an affinity for rain and gloominess in general, they are often seen taking melancholy walks in the rain… without an umbrella. [Drop in general.]

They do occasionally detach themselves from their current book and engage in the pointless, shallow social activities that the rest of the world uses only [Drop only.] to distract [Awkward use of distract here. How about to elude etc.?] from the grim reality of life.
[Again, as in earlier sentence, simply write from grim reality.] When this happens, a large amount of alcohol can confer the emo philosopher with [ can confer upon the emo philosopher traits etc. would be better.] traits of their close relation, the stoner philosopher. Articulating nothing more intellectual than “Whoa!” repeatedly while staring up at the stars, or alternately giving long speeches about the futility of hope - both distinct possibilities. Drunkenness, however, is only an occasional respite from the weight of being serious all the time. [Note the unnecessary words gumming up this great material: repeatedly, alternately, long, occasional.]

The most recent on-screen emo philosopher is Dwayne from last year’s “Little Miss Sunshine.” He took an oath of silence in honor of his hero, none other than existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche. His over-the-top rebellious antics are common. [are common is a blah way to end the sentence.] When faced with the depressing conclusions dictated by their chosen philosophical gurus, some philosophy students have no choice but resorting to periods of long silences and listening to Elliott Smith. [Drop depressing; drop chosen. And rewrite latter part of the sentence something like this: resort to periods of silence or the music of Elliot Smith.]

If you have not been able to discern it already from my glowing portrayal [Drop glowing.], yours truly is a member of this philosophical following. My pride in my membership of this minority group [membership in.] stems from an incident that occurred [Drop that occurred.] last year at a party. When I answered a typical inquiry to my major [about my major] with “philosophy,” the response from the questioner [Drop from the questioner.] was: “Oh, did you just try to pick the easiest major possible?”

I was outraged, hot fire burned in my black heart. I knew that Socrates was flipping a shit somewhere in his Greek grave. [Flipping a shit's fun.] I proceeded to explain - while internally cursing
[Drop internally.] myself for participating in this idle distraction from life [Yet again: Drop from life.]- that actually, philosophy is one of the oldest and most interesting disciplines in the world.

Sadly, this one incident [Drop one.] is not the only time the seriousness of my major has been doubted. When faced with these naysayers, I need only relate the horror of the loathed branch of philosophy called “logic.” [Describe might be better than relate. And I'd drop the horror of.]

My teaching assistant actually told us on the first day that this class had a tendency to make students cry, give up hope and get a bad grade. Although filling me with dread, I suppose his warning was helpful. Now I can tell everyone who says philosophy majors aren’t serious students to eat shit and try to solve a biconditional derivation or read 100 pages on the word “the.” [This is good. Feisty.]

Despite their differences, emo kids and stoner philosophy students can unite in agreement [Unite in agreement is somewhat redundant and clunky. How about agree on one thing?] over one thing: Stop fucking confusing us with psychology majors!' [Excellent final line. An earned exclamation mark.]

Labels: SOS

I've been haunted about the issue concerning plagiarism in connection with President Poshard since I first heard about it. [Haunted is certainly seasonally appropriate...]

My first reflections went back to a recent issue about Dr. Walter Wendler being replaced because of plagiarism. [Wendler is one of three high-ranking SIU administrators who plagiarized.]

I've researched the dictionary and found the meaning of the word to be "To take (ideas, writings, etc.) from (another) and pass them off as one's own." I am persuaded by this definition.

Dr. Wendler didn't plagiarize anyone, because he was using his own plan for a project on the SIU campus. [He recycled a plan he'd prepared for a whole other university and, largely word for word, just stuck it onto SIU. This was stupid and lazy. He also more straightforwardly plagiarized in a speech he gave at SIU.] Dr. Wendler comes across to me as a fine gentleman and an asset to any organization. I've met him on campus a couple of times, and he is very well dressed, presents himself well and speaks to me although he doesn't know me. I'm honored. [See, this is the non-'thesdanian thing. In UD's world, defending a guy from plagiarism charges on the basis of the cut of his suit isn't considered a good move.]

He is a Christian man [Dresses well and isn't Jewish or anything.] and objects to some of the trends on campus, and I, for one, agree with him in what he attempted to do and his attitude about the whole affair. [What whole affair? This is mysterious. Haunting.]

I wonder if these issues [??] stimulated the anonymous letters that inspired the original accusations. I've been guilty of quoting the Bible at times without giving credit and have gotten away with it. President Poshard has been exonerated. Let's correct the issue with Dr. Wendler. [He'll be exonerating the third SIU plagiarist next.]

Labels: SOS

'The controversy surrounding the president of Southern Illinois University has begun to bother me. [Recall SOS's many, many cautions against beginning a letter of this sort with how upset, hot, bothered, wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again, you are. Feelings expressed in this way do nothing for an argument except make it feel minutely, dully, personal.] While I have met Dr. Poshard on several occasions professionally, I have no vested interest in the affair. However, as it is playing out I have several observations and questions. [Dead ringer for Mr. Collins, Pride and Prejudice.]

My first deals with the continuous calls for "open and honest" revelation on the part of Dr. Poshard. If that is the case, why is that not also required of the person(s) who brought to light the issue in the first place? [The author of this letter will prove quite the fan of the quotation mark. Read on.]

Next, I struggle with a concept of law known as the statute of limitations. [Writer thinks you're stupid. "...a concept of the law known as..." ] I believe that in law there are very few actions that do not have to follow that rule. One of those exceptions is for murder.

If an academic panel found the text of Dr. Poshard's work acceptable over 20 years ago, why is it an issue now? Please tell me we are not making this "issue" as grave a matter as that of taking a life? [Quotation marks around issue mean to say I don't think it's an issue! It's a non-issue! I speet on your "issue"...] I am also troubled by the faculty vote at SIUE and rational of the person who proposed it. [He means rationale. I think. Bit murky in here.] Quoting a former U.S. President: "What is 'is'?" [Meta-quotation marks. Not murky. Send a search party.]

In philosophy there is a construct known as "cause and effect." [Same thing as with statute of limitations above. Since we've never heard of cause and effect, the writer introduces it to us here. With quotation marks around it.] I wonder what the "real" cause is? [Though a Reverend, author appears to be a radical skeptic. "Does" "reality" "exist"?] Is it academic integrity or perhaps the not so off hand remark to separate the two campuses? Or could it be something else? In short, I find this small rodent-like bump being made into the latest glacial peak. [Off the rails here..] It seems that we are more and more becoming a people caught up in the minutiae while real problems within society remain.

Yes, academic integrity is important, but to the detriment of "real" societal issues; I think not! Perhaps some of those in the academic "ivory towers" and the editorial offices who have been calling for the removal of Dr. Poshard would like to join me in my office where I deal with people who are trying to purchase gasoline for their cars, put food on their tables, pay their rent or keep their utilities connected; "real" issues for "real" people.

Is it not time to return some "common" sense to the issues that seem to drive our media and our lives?

Rev. Gary Gummersheimer

Murphysboro, IL'

Labels: SOS

'Thousands of Americans will travel to colleges and universities this fall for "parents' weekend." [Drop the effing quotation marks! ... Who told me that there's a whole blog now devoted to unnecessary quotation marks?] They'll wander leaf-strewn lawns and quadrangles with their sons and daughters, asking earnest questions about courses, sports and friends.

Later, when they retire to the local Hilton, Sheraton or Holiday Inn, they might notice something funny: It looks a lot like their children's dormitory. [This actually is funny, and a good comic writer could do great things with it... The idea that the parents' hotel room might indeed be less glamorous than their kid's dorm is a winner. But this writer will not be able to capitalize on the comic potential.]

Dorms are changing - to resemble hotels. Student centers have gotten makeovers, too. They look like museums or corporate office buildings. [These sentences, which gesture in the direction of description, but don't really describe, would be better if they featured actual physical details.]

At elite private universities and even at some public ones, students have nicer facilities and services than their parents could have imagined. That raises big questions about what we're teaching this generation and why.

Consider George Washington University in Washington [This is the Snapshots from Home bit in this post.], where incoming students receive engraved chocolates under their pillows during freshmen orientation. [Nothing's too good for UD's charges.] Or Ball State University in Ohio, which just opened a $36 million residence hall featuring mobile furniture, a digital music lab, and a dining hall that takes online take-out orders. [Isn't all furniture -- except for my new baby grand -- mobile?]

Plasma TVs? Got 'em. Refrigerators and microwaves? Check. Fitness center? Of course. Weekly housecleaning service? For an extra fee, it's yours. [The question and answer plus slangy language thing here is sort of lame.]

That's hardly the kind of luxury that Princeton president Woodrow Wilson envisioned a century ago, when he commissioned residential buildings. Wilson worried that too many students had moved off campus into "eating clubs," which separated them according to interests, tastes and wealth. Better that they live together in monasterylike brick or stone dormitories, sealed off from the world.

"A university was conceived as a place where the community life and spirit were supreme," wrote one Princeton architect in 1909, three years before Wilson entered the White House. "It was a walled city against materialism and all of its works." [Not sure of the wisdom of choosing America's most status-conscious, Social Registered university for your example of higher university values.]

After World War I, Harvard erected seven new dormitories along two sides of its famous yard. Featuring elaborate outside details but humble interiors, the dorms created a literal and symbolic divide between students and the surrounding city.

At new women's colleges, meanwhile, educators feared that off-campus boarding houses would lead innocent young women astray. So they took special care to construct solid but simple dormitories that would place all students under college supervision - and on equal economic footing. [He's muddying things here. Why bring in this now-unattractive paternalism? Does the writer want to go back to that, as well as to anti-materialism?]

"We have a chance to see what the human spirit can do when unhampered either by deprivation or by excess," the dean of Smith College wrote in 1919, praising a new set of dormitories.

The big boom in dorm construction occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, sparked by massive state and federal spending. In 1958, the University of California's nine campuses could house only 2,900 students; by 1970, they had residential space for nearly 20,000. Despite some new architectural styles, most of these dormitories were built in concrete or cinder block - functional, not fancy.

Fast-forward to the latest $22 million dormitory at Tufts University, offering suites with two large singles off a sunlit living room. Each has a dining room with a glass table and a kitchen with a dishwasher. "This is like going from Amerisuites to the Ritz-Carlton," a Tufts senior told the Boston Globe last month.

The dorm is a hotel, but it just got way nicer. That's bad news for anyone who cares about the future of the university. [Note the abruptness with which the writer now returns to the argument he introduced at the beginning of the essay. This is of course about the space constraint he's under. But it comes across as too sudden -- unprepared, unsupported.]

By providing really nice things for our kids, we're teaching them to expect such goodies as their due. And we're forgetting the older collegiate ideal, which prized the life of the mind over the lure of materialism.

Only a segment of students can afford the new luxuries, of course, which makes matters worse. More colleges now price dorms at different rates, depending on how many bells and whistles are included. So rich kids get the fancier residence halls and poorer students the older ones, which yields the economic divide Wilson and his generation wanted to avoid. [Again, it's not as if Princeton ever housed an economic divide.]

How did we get here? As government aid has declined, colleges chase the students with the most dollars, and the best way to do that is to offer really cool amenities. University presidents may not like catering to the whims of already-privileged 18-year-olds, but competing schools are doing it, so what choice is there?

During the Cold War, that kind of thinking was called "mutually assured destruction." At universities today, the era could be called "mutually assured consumption." And we're all impoverished by it. [Ask yourself: Is this a strong piece? I think the answer's no. And why is it not strong? Because it's sketchy. It's not able to gather its complicated and multifaceted subject matter into a concise little polemic. And the main reason for that failure, IMHO, lies in the writer's lack of an individual sensibility. The one crucial ingredient missing in this piece is an interesting consciousness. The writer might have, for instance, started in the first-person rather than the third, drawing on his own years of university life to give his argument a sense of emotional immediacy to go with its intellectual substance. Instead, his voice is that of a vague, disembodied, complainer.]'

Labels: SOS

The first signal Division I’s dashboard indicators project [Cute name, and UD's just able to make out that it has something to do with cars.] has revealed is that the “check engine” light is on. Athletics spending is progressing at a rate three times that of overall university spending — a pace presidents and chancellors know is not sustainable in the long run. [The piece is about to announce a new service for member universities -- the NCAA will provide schools with comparative sports spending numbers from the other schools. Note that the piece does begin with a seeming acknowledgment of problems in bigtime university spending on athletics. But, typical of bath salt writing, it will do this only in order to calm readers' fears as the piece progresses.]

While the blinking beacon may be alarming to some, others are reassured [The calming process begins.] that the NCAA’s collaboration with the National Association of College and University Business Officers to produce a uniform data-reporting system and provide dashboard indicators that allow for peer comparison will serve as a financial GPS for big-time intercollegiate athletics. [Note the hokey playing out of the dashboard metaphor.]

The dashboards, which are expected to be finalized in spring 2008, are to fiscal responsibility as the APR is to academic reform. [This sentence exemplifies the to be verb problem in writing, about which SOS has written in greater detail here. In one sentence, the writer has given us four instances of is: are, to be, are, is. It makes for a dull and wordy sentence. Rewrite it something like this: The dashboards, due in spring 2008, are a kind of APR of fiscal responsibility. Your reader knows what APR means.] They are benchmarks developed on a by-campus basis that provide presidents, athletics directors and university CFOs the most comprehensive, accurate and comparable data to date that inform decisions about athletics spending.

That means Kent State can compare itself to its Mid-American Conference peers in its reliance upon university-allocated funds as a percentage of the total athletics budget. Texas Tech can see where it ranks among Big 12 schools in football revenues. Duke can run a comparison with other private institutions on athletics giving. Oregon can determine its percentile in revenues via ticket sales. Illinois can stack up against other traditional basketball powers in facility investment. A Football Championship Subdivision institution can see the investment it takes to reclassify to the Football Bowl Subdivision. [This is a good paragraph, with varied prose and rich examples. It mentions one of UD's favorites, Texas Tech, where four of every ten annual debt service dollars repays loans for athletics facilities. Texas Tech's program just emptied its reserve fund because of a multi-million dollar deficit.]

In other words, the dashboards can be all things to all schools. Simply put, it is the best customized financial data Division I has ever had, and the system is being applauded by those who will use it. [We're living in the best of all possible worlds. It's not as if many of the schools mentioned in this article are, like Texas Tech, ancient hulking sports factories with almost no interest in academics, schools who'll be made so anxious about this new data about what their rivals are spending that they'll add a few more catastrophic athletic expenditures to the ones they've already made. No -- things are great, and they'll be made greater by the dashboard indicators.]

“We do a lot of benchmarking at the institutional level,” said Michigan State University’s Kathy Lindahl, the school’s vice president for financial administration. “The dashboard project for athletics has tremendous potential in that it gives you instant validation as to whether you are ahead of the curve, behind it or in the ballpark. The data bring athletics to a level of sophistication that universities are accustomed to in other areas of the campus.” [Machine-generated prose, with an eerie manufactured enthusiasm thrown in... Oh, and here's another example of this sort of prose...]

... “Presidents are deeply engaged in benchmarking in every other aspect of our work — why not in athletics?” University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher said. “We are creating a system for accountability for the value added of a college degree, a system about what students are learning from their general studies program and a system about the degree to which students are satisfied with their college experience. We are using national instrumentation to probe those areas, so the idea of a common data set for gauging the return on our investment in athletics is just as important.” [Gauging what's going on -- financially, legally, morally, academically -- in most of bigtime university athletics isn't about dashboards. It's about sledgehammers. Texas Tech doesn't need sophisticated instrumentation to know it's got its head up its ass.]


...“The kind of change we’re talking about will be more incremental than revolutionary,” said University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Chancellor James Moeser, who as a Task Force member helped draft the white paper on the dashboard project. “But we are giving leaders the tools to make more informed decisions. It’s up to every president and chancellor to use them in their own situations.” [This overlooks the fact that presidents and chancellors, at many of these schools, have little to no power over athletics.]

...“There will be a lot more conversation between the athletics department and our vice chancellor for financial administration than there has been in the past, for example,” Moeser said. “And there will be more regular presentations by athletics to the budget committee.” [Uh-huh.]

... Task Force members acknowledge the possibility that the additional data may in fact fuel the perceived arms race in athletics [Note the word "perceived." It's not perceived. It's actual.] rather than douse the flame, but most of them downplay the concern [Bath salt prose. No cause for alarm! Keep doing what you've been doing!], saying that more accurate data beats little or unreliable information.

... Others, though, think the dashboards will prompt institutions in the upper echelon to hit cruise control and some in the lower half to step on the gas.

“Large governing bodies are guilty of that kind of behavior, and you can’t help it,” said Katie Hill, a senior associate athletics director at Clemson University. “You presume that everyone’s decision-making is based on the global good. It’s not. Does our government scale back spending because the national budget is out of hand? No. Does our national debt keep us from borrowing from China? No. We’ve heard the expression that all politics are local — well, all athletics decisions are local, too. It’s about what our universities, our athletics departments, and our fans and supporters expect from us.” [Writer sticks the truth of the situation at the end of the piece -- things like dashboard indicators hasten the trend in which schools like the University of Texas maintain obscenely over-funded sports programs, and smaller schools destroy themselves trying to keep up. The writer gives us another paragraph insisting this worry is groundless, and then he concludes the piece.]

Labels: SOS

We are writing in response to the "Our Word" editorial (including the cartoons) in Friday's DE, and Monday's "The P Word" editorial (including the cartoon), both which have occasioned a good deal of negative response on campus and in the wider community. We hope that you will explain what's puzzling about those editorials, as an initial contribution toward developing a reasoned and positive educational experience from what now is a sadly contentious episode in our university's life. [Beyond the vapid positive educational experience cliche, note that these two initial sentences are, well, puzzling. Does the word "puzzling," for instance, mean puzzling to the writers, or puzzling in the editorials? And already the tone feels condescending, irritated, defensive.]

What needs explaining is this: In Friday's paper, under the headline of [Drop of.]"Exactly what the doctor ordered," you say: "The committee has failed us. The Board of Trustees has failed us. Our university is a joke. And the Daily Egyptian is at a loss for words."

The initial question we ask is: What committee has failed you, and how? The first editorial appeared on the day that the review committee, charged last month by Chancellor Fernando Treviño, delivered its report to the chancellor, who in turn delivered it to the Board of Trustees. Yet the cartoons that follow those four sentences show a caricature labeled "blue ribbon committee" - an entity formed by SIU President Glenn Poshard, more than a year ago, which delivered its report last month. Both editorials confuse these very different committees.

These are different committees, chosen in radically different ways, and with completely different charges. We cannot speak for the "blue ribbon committee," and we certainly do not speak for the Board (any more than the Board speaks for us). Nor can we speak for President Poshard - or he, for us. However, we can speak as members of the review committee to what we have determined.

We ask that you, and all concerned persons [all concerned persons is police-speak] in our community, listen to the press conference and hear, for yourselves, that the chair of the Board of Trustees, in response to a specific question, said that "the Board does not feel that he committed plagiarism."

The chair of the review committee, however, responded to the same question by saying that the review committee concluded that "inadvertent or unintentional plagiarism" was the result of student Poshard's citation practices. (The Southern Illinoisan provides the audio: See their Web site under "Archives," Oct. 11.)

The report submitted by the review committee on the day that you published the first editorial does not consider plagiarism to be a joke. [Since it has treated it like one, it certainly does consider it a joke.] And the report submitted by the review committee on the day that you published that editorial does determine that plagiarism, understood within a particular definition of the many that exist [There aren't many definitions of plagiarism. These writers are obfuscating in an effort to get Poshard off the hook.], is present in the dissertation that student Poshard's committee approved. One item in the review committee's charge was to determine the "severity" of instances of incorrect citation. [It's clear that Poshard's dissertation represents severe plagiarism. Long verbatim passages from other places appear in it.]

Just as there is a spectrum of severity in a messy room, a case of poison ivy, a broken bone, or a misleading newspaper article, there is a spectrum of severity in plagiarism. Correlatively [Ooh, aren't we fancy. Correlatively. Throughout this piece, these two, who can't write, are talking down to students who can.], the law recognizes shades of severity in both civil and criminal cases - from negligence to intentional wrong doing; from manslaughter to first degree murder. People commonly accept that there are differences in the character of acts that make for differences in what decision is warranted. We determined that the category of "inadvertent plagiarism" was the most warranted in this case. [But why? In his remarks about the case immediately after the paper's discovery of it, Poshard himself seems to acknowledge that he was aware of what he was doing.]

Lastly, although we regret that the Board feels otherwise, that difference should suggest, at the very least, that we have acted independently in investigating the allegations and reaching our conclusions and recommendations. [What? Because you attached a bogus designation to your exoneration of him while the Board didn't bother to do this? That only makes the Board more honest than you.] Our report, listed as "Faculty Review Committee Report," along with the Board's statement and other statements and reports, is available for all to read at http://news.siu.edu.

The DE editorial board, as well as various commentators and letter writers, feel that because the review committee was composed of SIU faculty, it could not have remained objective because we were evaluating our boss. We believe that you should reconsider this presumption.

First, President Poshard is not our boss. We do not report to him directly or indirectly. We are all tenured faculty. [So? He determines your budgets, and is certainly, in a variety of other ways, in a position to make your lives unpleasant.]

Second, had the chancellor or we decided to convene an outside panel to review the allegations, this panel could not have been blind to the subject of the review (as is usually required in external, peer review). [I don't understand this sentence.]

Third, had that committee come to the same conclusion that we did, we're sure that the DE editorial board would have found many ways to discredit them, such as accusing us or the chancellor of cherry-picking panel members. To avoid any appearance of cherry-picking, the chancellor named this committee on the basis of our already being in elected positions of leadership in the Faculty Association, Faculty Senate and Graduate Council. [This is a sweet one. Choose institutional insiders to make sure the committee isn't made up of insiders.]

Fourth, we knew from the beginning that our findings would be highly scrutinized by both President Poshard's distracters [The student editors missed this one. Or did they -- as UD hopes -- non-inadvertently retain it, in order to display the semi-literacy of professors who feel comfortable condescending to students about their writing?], and his supporters. Moreover, we have our academic colleagues around the world looking over our shoulders. These concerns kept us in check, and kept us honest in our attempts to reach a fair conclusion.

Finally, as teachers and researchers, we suggest that reading our report and listening to the press conference might alleviate your sense of being at a loss for words. In the light of reading and listening to the relevant evidence, we, as members of the review committee, ask that you reconsider the belief that you have been failed, in light of reading and listening to the relevant sources of information and considering the following: [Dizzyingly circular sentence full of light.]

Had the review committee not followed due process, as set out in established university policies (specifically, in the Student Conduct Code) for investigating allegations of academic misconduct, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not applied thought, deliberation, and analysis, and instead relied solely on plagiarism software technology to reach our conclusion, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not gone further in our analysis than is indicated in recent media reports - which, in some cases, are misleading or inaccurate - we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not fully investigated the context and circumstances in which the alleged plagiarized text was prepared, we would have failed you.

Had the review committee not concluded that the attribution style and other errors resulted in inadvertent plagiarism, we would have failed you. [Dayenu.]

Would you want any current, former or future SIU student accused of academic dishonesty to not be treated with due process, as we have treated this former student?

Labels: SOS

'Past generations of Arizona's football and men's basketball teams wrote the headlines, but when essay assignments arrived, your high-profile athletes took a hit in the loss column. [The reporter for the University of Arizona newspaper is a freshman who writes pretty well. Naturally, though, SOS has some suggestions...] [...For instance, generations would be better than past generations. Past is implicit when you refer to generations. And while SOS is about to notice and more or less admire the flamboyant language throughout the piece, she will also issue a caution about overuse...]


Both teams held the worst graduation rates in the Pacific 10 Conference from 1997-2000, according to the NCAA's Graduation Success Rate report released Oct. 3. For the third year in a row, Arizona football occupied the Pac-10 cellar with a 41 percent graduation rate of players earning a degree within six years of enrollment.

This year, the men's basketball team joined the basement party with a backboard-shattering 25 percent graduation rate - less than half of the national average of 61 percent. [Basement party's nice, and backboard-shattering's great, but when you put them together you get a mixed metaphor.]

The McKale male ballers may have grabbed plenty of rebounds in March, but when it came down to snagging a diploma on the hardwood, three of four players shot the air ball in May. [Peppy, peppy. But a little over the top with all the sports metaphors.] Wonder if 25 percent from the free-throw line would be an acceptable performance on the court? [Very good. But I'd tighten it a bit: Would 25 percent from the free throw line look good to you? Something like that.]

Then again, look who's laughing now, sitting pretty with multi-million dollar bankrolls. [Look who's laughing now is a walloping cliche... But SOS has pointed out before on this blog that sports writing is cliche writing, so there may be no way out of this...]

"For the elite-level kid, basketball is everything," said Josh Pastner, a UA men's basketball assistant coach. "Why do you think Mike Bibby came here? He came here to get ready for his chosen profession."

Pastner believes the NCAA data is skewed, since the numbers penalize student-athletes who leave school to turn professional. [Um, in what way is this skewed? It's exactly what the numbers mean to reveal.] The percentage also fails to credit former players like Mile Simon, who left Arizona in 1998 but returned to finish his degree outside of the designated six-year period.

Can you blame current NBA superstars Bibby, Gilbert Arenas and Jason Terry for walking away from Tucson to cash contracts combining for hundreds of millions?

"Make Gilbert Arenas stay four years - I want to hear how they're going to do that," said Jim Rosborough, UA special assistant to the athletic director.

In his 18 years as an assistant coach for Olson's Arizona men's basketball program, Rosborough ensured his players attended class. But since the new mindset in athletics drastically evolved into dollar signs, academic priorities evidently fell down the ladder. [Rewrite this sentence, getting rid of drastically and evidently, and choosing between dollar signs and ladders for your images.]

Through the eyes of an elite athlete, turning professional is a continuous fixture [Continuous is redundant. And I'm not sure fixture is the best image. How about saying fixation?] from youth basketball up through high school. Rosborough said those attitudes develop from parents' pressures to become great.

And as Pastner said, "In the NBA, they don't require you to have a degree."

The debate boils down to one simple argument: stay for an education or leave for financial freedom. [That's two simple arguments.] Eat at Which Wich, or own a Which Wich franchise? [Nice example.] In senior cornerback Antoine Cason's case, his education remains priceless.

Despite opportunities to enter last year's NFL draft and prognosticators pegging him as a first-round pick, Cason believes his tough decision to stay was a "gut check," showing dedication to finish out something he started. [Writer did well to highlight "gut check." It's a good phrase.]

"You can't duplicate your college experience," Cason said. "Graduation is one of my goals, and that's what I want to do."

Rocky LaRose [Great name!], a UA associate athletic director, believes being last place in the Pac-10 is irrelevant, due to the diversity of public and private schools in the conference. [Huh?] She compares athletic graduation rates to the entire UA rate, which she said has exceeded the school percentage in the past. [Confused sentence. Problem starts with the word which. Rewrite for clarity.] The recent decrease, however, dips athletes below the university percentage.

LaRose, who forecasted such a downfall, seeks an optimistic future after the football program went through four head coaches in five years between 2000-2004, leading to multiple player transfers. [Futures can't be optimistic. Only people can be optimistic. Find a better word.]

The academic unit now reports to the university side, rather than the athletics department.

More changes include a revamping of the C.A.T.S. program that Pastner describes as "the best in America" and the MVP of McKale Center. From life skills to academic help, C.A.T.S. provides athletes with the proper resources to succeed in the classroom.

Pastner stresses the significance of the term "student-athlete" over the common mindset of an athlete-student.

Hopefully Wildcats today and beyond bear down and take that to heart. [Hopefully always comes across as a bit awkward - and a bit rhetorically weak - when used in this way. It's particularly limp in the context of what's just been written. Most of the staff has just told him they don't give a shit whether athletes graduate. So the hopefulness seems exclusive to the reporter.]'

---the wildcat online---

Labels: SOS

Labels: SOS

So I know

He put moisturizer on the morning he shot
thirty-three people. That stands out. The desire
to be soft. I could tell the guy from NPR
that's what I want, to be soft, or the guy
from the LA Times, or the guy from CNN who says
we should chat. Such a casual word, chat.
I'm chatting to myself now: you did not
do enough about the kid who took your class
a few buildings from where he killed.
With soft hands in Norris Hall killed.
This is my confession. And legs I think
the roommate said, moisturizer in the shower,
I don't know what I could have done
something. Something more than talk to someone
who talked to someone, a food chain of language
leading to this language of "no words" we have now.
Maybe we exist as language and when someone dies
they are unworded. Maybe I should have shot the kid
and then myself given the math. 2 < 33.
I was good at math. Numbers are polite, carefree
if you ask the random number generators.
Mom, I don't mean the killing above.
It's something I write like "I put my arms
around the moon." Maybe sorry's the only sound
to offer pointlessly and at random
to each other forever, not because of what it means
but because it means we're trying to mean,
I am trying to mean more than I did
when I started writing this poem, too soon
people will say, so what. This is what I do.
If I don't do this I have no face and if I do this
I have an apple for a face or something vital
almost going forward is the direction I am headed.
Come with me from being over here to being over there,
from this second to that second. What countries
they are, the seconds, what rooms of people
being alive in them and then dead in them.
The clocks of flowers rise, it's April
and yellow and these seconds are an autopsy
of this word,
suddenly.

Labels: SOS

'...[P]ublic concern, if not yet an outcry, is on the rise.

For many parents, the cost of college casts a long shadow before and beyond the time their child actually spends in college. With financial aid lagging behind tuition at private institutions and state subsidies declining at public ones, it gets harder every year for low-income students to pay their way. Like hospitals, colleges have generally got the benefit of the doubt on the question of why they cost so much...

...It’s happening at every rung of the academic ladder. ...[A] review panel sharply criticized the senior administrators at Virginia Tech...

...College presidents, naturally, are armed with answers. ... [U]niversities and faculty members have been raking in royalties from technologies ...

...How are college students treated in this brave new academic world?

... [S]o why, especially in view of the immense explosion of knowledge requisite for a true education, shouldn’t the time allotted for college stretch too?

... But college should be a place that fosters open debate of the ethical issues posed by modern life ... They can be profoundly transformative experiences that bolster the motive — indeed, the need — to live a life of civic engagement.

... As our children go through the arduous process of choosing a college and trying to persuade that college to choose them, it will be a sign of improved social health if we can get to the point of asking not about the school’s ranking but whether it’s a place that helps students confront hard questions in an informed way.'

Labels: SOS

---the hoya, georgetown university student newspaper---

Labels: SOS

'LEGAL WOES BEGIN TO TARNISH UT's REPUTATION [Begin? Tarnish? The reporter needs to get out of Texas.]


There have been dark days for coach Mack Brown at Texas, but rarely have they coincided with a 4-0 start and top-10 national ranking. [Again, big ol' Texas hankies come out right away for the person who did the recruiting.]

These days, it's not the close calls against Arkansas State or Central Florida that trouble Brown. [Wasn't anyone troubled by Brown's attraction to criminals when he was forming his team?]

It's the seemingly never-ending wave of off-field legal problems that has brought more pressure than an Oklahoma pass rush the past few months. A string of arrests and suspensions has made the Longhorns a national punch line befitting an opening dialogue for Jay Leno and David Letterman.

What do you call a drug ring in Austin? A huddle.

The Longhorns have adopted a new "honor system." Yes, your honor. No, your honor.

Four UT football players are riding in a car, who's driving? The police.

Mack Brown should not have hired a new defensive coordinator this offseason. He should have hired a defense attorney.

Even the familiar Hook 'Em Horns slogan has been replaced by Book 'Em Horns from rival schools.

Texas officials are not amused.

"We need to fix it and keep it fixed," UT men's athletic director DeLoss Dodds said. "We will survive and come through this." [Tough guy.... Or Blanche Dubois? You make the call.]

Since June, six UT football players have been arrested on charges ranging from driving while intoxicated to drug possession to aggravated robbery to tampering with evidence.

Brown, in his 10th season at Texas, has acted swiftly and sternly. [Blatant damage control for local consumption. Reporter has no shame.] One player (safety Robert Joseph) has been kicked off the team and three others are suspended indefinitely pending the legal process.

"I've dealt with more in six months than I've dealt with really in about 23 years," Brown said. "Especially more than in the 10 (years) here." [Sob. Why me?]

The latest arrest came last Monday when James Henry, a freshman running back, was arrested on third-degree felony charges of beating up a victim and tampering with physical evidence in connection with a July 27 robbery allegedly involving two other football players — Joseph and defensive tackle Andre Jones. [Teamwork.]


A Hard Town and State

Henry's arrest came on the same day Brown chided coverage of the school's legal run-ins, saying "Austin is as hard on people and this state's as hard on kids as I've ever seen." [Not sure what these two sentences are trying to say.]

Brown, who led the Longhorns to a national title during the 2005 season, has taken a tough stance with a zero tolerance policy.

Sophomore linebacker Sergio Kindle and junior defensive end Henry Melton were suspended for the first three games of the season for their DWI arrests, the harshest penalties handed down by Brown since arriving in 1998.

Last season, Brown suspended starting cornerback Tarell Brown for the Longhorns' showdown with top-ranked Ohio State after he was charged with misdemeanor drug possession and unlawful gun possession. The drug charge against Brown was dropped.

Another player, running back Ramonce Taylor, was charged with possession of marijuana prior to last season and sentenced to 60 days in jail. He transferred to Texas College, where he was academically ineligible. He was not selected in April's NFL draft.

"Young people who do not obey the law, university or team rules will continue to be disciplined with a stern hand and we will move forward," Brown said. "We continue to have a zero tolerance policy in that regard." [If I were a Texas student, I'd wonder whether the best use of my athletic fee is the recruitment of criminals and then the suspension of same. How about not recruiting them?... The university's playing a high-stakes, cynical game: It knows it's recruiting bad guys, but figures maybe it can control most of them long enough to get a championship out of them. Probabilities being what they are, the university is losing this game. The rush of events reveals UT as a university that doesn't know its ass from a hole in the ground.]

The UT administration has solidly supported Brown, who received a two-year contract extension and sizable raise in late August that makes him among the nation's five highest-paid football coaches. Dodds repeatedly has praised Brown for his handling of the program, and UT president William Powers Jr. offered a show of support last week. [Guys. Guys are pretty bizarre. A coach whose mismanagement of his job has been so flagrant as to make his university a national laughingstock gets the total adoring backing of his university. UD awaits UT's announcement of his million dollar bonus.]



Coach is Devastated [Hankies now sopping wet at the thought of this fine man dragged through the mud because of the way he recruits football players.]


Those close to Brown said he has been "devastated" by the off-field problems and how it has stained the program's reputation. [When all else fails, get girly.] After the latest arrest, Brown took full responsibility and said "it's all on me."

"What I've got to do is just go back and look at me, and not point fingers, not make excuses but put it solely on my shoulders," Brown said. "I am responsible for everything we do, and I want to make sure the University of Texas is getting what they're paying for and right now I've got to do a better job."

In 20 years as coach from 1957-76, legendary UT coach Darrell Royal said he dealt with his share of problems, but nothing compared to the current Longhorns. Although it was a different era and different kids, Royal said the message remains the same.

"I eliminated some of them, just told them to move out of the dorm and their scholarship wasn't any good anymore. That makes it damn serious to the rest of them that are there," he said. "I could do things they can't do now. They'd like to, but they can't. It's against the rules." [Well, but what they can still do is refuse to recruit shits.]

What can the Longhorns do to prevent such incidents? Presently, freshmen and sophomores are required to live in on-campus dormitories. Those upperclassmen requesting to live off campus must receive permission from everyone from the coaching staff to the athletic department's academic advisers.

There are no plans to implement a curfew or centralized housing for the team, Dodds said. All but one of the arrests occurred during the summer, when the NCAA prohibits contact between the coaching staff and players. [Curfew. See how pretty your campus gets when you only care about whether someone can carry the ball?]

Where the Longhorns can avoid issues is during the recruiting process [Ah, oui. Finally shows up.], leaning heavily on Brown's close ties to the state's high school coaches. [It's their fault, not mine!] None of the 19 players for the 2008 recruiting class have backed out of their commitments, including several from the Houston area, a school official said.

Joseph, who remains in Travis County Jail facing two felonies, was charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession and evading arrests less than nine months after committing to the Longhorns in August 2005, according to the Port Arthur News. Brown had no knowledge of Joseph's previous arrest, a school spokesman said.

"Where we need to start is recruiting," Dodds said. "We are careful who we recruit to the University of Texas." [Official Orwellian Statement.]

Texas isn't alone in dealing with off-field legal problems. No fewer than seven Florida football players have been in trouble with the law since the Jan. 8 national championship victory over Ohio State. [This intends to make the paper's readers feel better. Hell, we only have six. Florida has seven!]

Oklahoma State linebacker Chris Collins, a former UT commitment, continues to play despite remaining under indictment for sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl in 2004. [See how naughty OSU is? We're not that bad.]

Nebraska suspended Maurice Purify, the team's leading receiver last season, for one game after he pleaded no contest to assault this summer.

With an influx of high school players leaving school a semester early to enroll in college, schools need to invest more in a support staff to tackle early problems arising from immaturity and being away from home for the first time, said sports psychologist Dr. John Murray. [Wheeling out the psychologist here... Another consoling move... These kids just need help adjusting... ]



Reputation at Stake

"Money should not be an issue when talking about the reputation and the success of the program," Murray said. "The administrators, alumni and power people at every particular campus across the country need to wake up, smell the coffee and get real." [More Dr. Phil poopoo.]

Despite the arrests, Brown said the problems are not indicative of his program.

"I will put our long-term record of character up against anybody," he said. [Mack's the one who needs a shrink. Pronto.]


• • •

A recap of recent arrests involving UT players.

Robert Joseph
Class/hometown:Sophomore/Port Arthur

Position:: Safety

Arrest dates: June 9 and July 29

Charges: Two charges of burglary of a vehicle (misdemeanor); aggravated robbery (first-degree felony) and tampering or fabricating physical evidence (third-degree felony).

Status: Transferred from the team (remains in Travis County Jail)


• • •

Henry Melton
Class/hometown: Junior/Grapevine

Position:: Defensive end

Arrest date: June 1

Charge: Driving while intoxicated

Status: Reinstated Sept. 17 after serving three-game suspension.


• • •

Sergio Kindle
Class/hometown: Sophomore/Dallas

Position:: Linebacker

Arrest date: July 28

Charge: Driving while intoxicated

Status: Reinstated Sept. 17 after serving three-game suspension.


• • •

Andre Jones
Class/hometown: Freshman/El Paso

Position:: Defensive tackle

Arrest date: Aug. 2

Charge: Aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, a first-degree felony.

Status: Suspended indefinitely from team


• • •

Tyrell Gatewood
Class/hometown: Senior/Tyler

Position:: Safety

Arrest date: Sept. 12

Charges: Two misdemeanor counts for drug possession.

Status: Suspended indefinitely from team


• • •

James Henry
Class/hometown: Redshirt freshman/Schertz

Position:: Running back

Arrest date: Sept. 17

Charges: Obstruction and tampering with evidence, third-degree felonies, in connection with July 27 robbery involving Joseph and Jones.

Status: Suspended indefinitely from team'

Labels: SOS

'HORNS LOOK TO PLAY FOOTBALL, FORGET ARRESTS

It was a rough summer for Mack Brown. [Starts, as all of these sorts of articles do, with sympathy for a coach experiencing the outcome of his own cynical recruitment strategies.]

Six of his Texas players were arrested -- the most recent on Monday -- and close wins against teams most considered big underdogs have left many wondering if his team is overrated.

Still, the No. 7 Longhorns are 3-0 heading into Saturday night's game against Rice (0-3). A comfortable win there could ease a lot of the anxiety around campus.

The talk of Texas right now is not about football. It's about a rash of felony and misdemeanor arrests, suspensions and what Brown can do to minimize the damage to the reputations of coach and school.

Fans are complaining, national sports columnists are taking pot shots and "Book'em Horns!" jokes are zipping around the Internet, leaving Brown trying to reign in a wave of bad publicity. [This is an AP story. You'd think the AP would know how to spell rein.]

"I've spent 33 years of my life coaching young people and trying to be a great role model for young people and prepare them for life after football," Brown said. "It has been very, very important in my life that we have a team with character and that they act responsibly. When someone is accused of trouble or has trouble, it's devastating to me personally." [As the criminals I recruit become more brazen, my cliches become more threadbare.]

University President William Powers went public this week with his support of Brown and the program.

"I strongly endorse the penalties he has imposed on this player and others who have been arrested for various offenses. [SOS likes "arrested for various offenses." It's a neat catch-all term.] I know Coach Brown feels accountable for the conduct of his team and that these players must be held accountable for their own behavior on and off the field," Powers said. [As the criminals we've recruited become more brazen, my cliches become more threadbare.]

Brown this week reinstated sophomore linebacker Sergio Kindle and junior defensive end Henry Melton, both suspended three games for drunken driving arrests over the summer.

"It's going to be good for us to have those guys back," linebacker Roddrick Muckelroy said.

Anything that allows Texas to concentrate on the playbook rather than the police blotter is welcome right now. Senior defensive tackle Derek Lokey said playing Rice helps the team put the arrests in the past.

"Instead of dividing the team, it's going to unite the team," Lokey said. [Win this one for the probation officer!] '

Labels: SOS

'THE MOST CORRUPT MAN IN CALIFORNIA [National Enquirer headline.]

How do you get hired and fired from a prestigious position in the same week?

That is what happened to my friend Erwin Chemerinsky. He signed a contract to become the first dean of the new law school at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) last week. Then, days later, he was fired because the UCI chancellor decided his liberal opinions made Erwin, one of the most respected, quoted, cited and beloved constitutional law scholars in the country, "too politically controversial" for the job. [Who's the author of the "too politically controversial" quotation? Estrich doesn't make it clear.]

Hogwash.

This column isn't about Erwin. [Um, so far it is.] In the world of law professors, everyone who knows Erwin — liberal and conservative — respects him. [It's still about him.] The outpouring of support [Cliche.] for him and the disgust at what was done to him have been overwhelming. It's about the cowardly fool who is leading his university down the tubes, the one who should be fired by the Board of Regents when it meets next week. [Cowardly fool is over the top. Estrich is preening. She means us to admire her hogwash and cowardly fool no bullshit approach. But it's over the top, so it feels like preening. Attention-getting. Tabloid stuff.]

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

So wrote Professor Lord Acton, who was the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, even though he had not been allowed to attend Cambridge as a student because he was Roman Catholic. In the same year, 1877, in a famous lecture on "The History of Freedom in Antiquity," Acton defined liberty as "the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion." [In classical music, they call them warhorses. In writing, the absolute power quotation is the equivalent of forty warhorses. It's an insult to your reader to drag this dead, pretentious, much-satirized statement out as if you're sharing some shiny wisdom-gem. And "So wrote"! She's simply convinced you're a fool, someone not worth any real thinking on her part ... And what's the relevance of the shit about Acton being a Catholic, etc? That supremo law prof/tv pundit Chemerinsky is a similar sort of martyr?]

By Lord Acton's standard, Dr. Michael Drake, Chancellor of the University of California at Irvine, is the most corrupt man in California. [An absurd statement. Same sort of crap hacks like Bill O'Reilly say.] His job is, or should be, to protect the "liberty" of both students and faculty, the academic freedom that is the cornerstone of great universities [Cliche.].

But Dr. Drake has a twisted view of academic freedom, one that allows Muslim students to engage in open anti-Semitism, to hold rallies on campus attacking Zionist control of the media, equating Jewish support for Israel with Hitler's Nazis, even (according to campus Republicans) displacing previously scheduled Young Republicans meetings with rallies denouncing Israel's right to exist. But there's no room for a liberal, Jewish law professor who is routinely the object of bidding wars between top-rated law schools vying for his services. [Since she has made no effort to introduce the relevance of this paragraph, its connection to the Chemerinsky/Drake situation is unclear. It comes across as more steam-blowing.]

Last February, Hillel of Orange County formed a task force to investigate what it viewed as a troubling number of anti-Semitic speeches and incidents on the UCI campus, including complaints by Jewish students that they were being followed and harassed by their Muslim classmates. That was before UCI's Intifada week this past spring, which included speakers supporting the terrorist group Hamas and a speech entitled "Zio-Nazis." That was before the infamous Ward Churchill, defender of the 9/11 attacks, was invited to speak on campus. [Yeah, hey, why don't I throw Churchill in too... I mean, what's she on about? Chemerinsky is Jewish... Is Estrich hinting that Drake's decision was another instance of what she believes to be his anti-Semitism?]

This past June, at a meeting attended by hundreds of concerned members of the Jewish community in Irvine, Dr. Drake told one parent, whose children don't want to attend UC Irvine because of the virulent expressions of hatred, not to worry because these incidents "are not every other day. It's a couple times a year." Asked why he didn't exercise his own right to free speech to "speak directly to statements made on campus" (as former Harvard President Lawrence Summers did when he opposed calls for divestment from Israel by terming such actions "anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent"), Dr. Drake ducked. [Does she mean this to be funny? Drake - duck? It's not clear.] "We have 1,000 guest speakers on campus every year. Could I evaluate them and say this one is anti-Semitic? I could not. What I could say is that as a person and a campus, we abhor hate speech, period."

On the other hand, we have no room for a liberal law professor — whose views were well known before he was hired, who is squarely in the mainstream of modern constitutional thought — because we're afraid to take the heat that may be coming from some of Drake's biggest donors. [On the other hand...? What the hell's she talking about? There's no discernable logic.] While Drake told Erwin it was the Regents he was worried about, that was an out-and-out lie. He later admitted he didn't consult a one of them, and instead pointed to an op-ed Erwin wrote back in mid-August about death penalty procedure — even though he signed a contract with Chemerinsky three weeks after the op-ed was published.

No, this was Drake's call, and it will doom his law school, if it doesn't doom him first.'

Labels: SOS

'Chancellor Drake:

We find deeply disturbing [Drop deeply.] the many [Drop many.] reports now circulating regarding the hiring and "firing" [Dump the quotation marks. He was fired. Say fired.] of Erwin Chemerinsky as the founding Dean of the UC Irvine Law School because he is too "politically controversial," and not least regarding [Two is too many regardings, especially since this comes from lawyer-types. You don't want this to sound like a brief.] your role in this unfortunate debacle [Okay, kids. Why is unfortunate debacle a prose debacle? Datz right. Because debacle is a very very extreme word designating a really really bad thing. Unfortunate - recall its amusing ironic use in those children's books about the unfortunate Baudelaire family - is a very moderate word. No debacle is ever unfortunate. Debacles are horrible, hideous, tragic...] We are disturbed because of the deep violation [Drop deep. Note how the very upset letter writer thinks to convey her upset by shoving intensifying adjectives everywhere. Don't do this. It has the opposite effect. It dilutes.] both of the integrity of the university and of the intrusion of outrageously one-sided politics and unacceptable [By now you get the idea. Outrageously and unacceptable have to go. You want to keep your temper, and you want your prose to be strong and direct.] ideological considerations into a hiring process that should be driven by academic excellence, administrative expertise, leadership capacity, and personal integrity. By your own admission, Professor Chemerinsky exhibits all of these qualities in very considerable measure, which is why you sought to hire him in the first instance. Thus to withdraw the offer even after it has been formally accepted confirms that it is for reasons that should play no role whatsoever in the process, as even self-professed conservative deans of law schools have been quick to point out.

We are deeply concerned [Drop deeply. Note that it is our third use of the word in two paragraphs.] because this action places UC Irvine once more in the spotlight for the most negative and debilitating of reasons. One commentator has ridiculed your action as rank amateurism, and we cannot help but agree. It makes attracting to UC Irvine administrators, faculty, and students of the highest quality so much more difficult, and will all but torpedo the appointment of a Dean of the new Law School of Chemerinsky's quality.

But perhaps above all we are deeply [Yikes.] concerned that, if the reports are true, as our institutional and intellectual leader, and as our representative, you have failed to defend the integrity of the university, its recruitment process, and the sanctity of academic freedom you have given voice to supporting in the past. We have no idea what pressure you came under from those promising to support the university financially or politically, but we have heard nothing of your public undertaking to stand up for the intellectual independence of the university, its hiring processes which weren't allowed as a consequence to run their course, of academic integrity and of the principle of reasonable independence. It is this that disturbs us most deeply. [Deeply... See how, at this point, winding up on this sentence tends to have little impact?]

We urge you in the strongest terms to reconsider your position, and to reverse your decision thus to reinstate the process for Professor Chemerinsky's appointment. Anything less is an attack on the integrity, reputation, and morale of faculty, staff, and students alike at the University of California, Irvine.

Labels: SOS

To the Editor: In regards to the recent stories concerning Glenn Poshard, I feel [In regards is a clunky formulation, best avoided; and SOS has already warned you off the emotive, girly I feel thing.] this is nothing more than the efforts of disgruntled individuals, Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption, who by remaining anonymous, give little credence to their allegations and in fact are cowardly. [Awkward word order, and ad hominem: disgruntled, cowardly...] This perpetuates the efforts of some to keep this university from moving forward. [The claim here is simply wrong. SIU was not moving forward as a university before this latest disgrace; and if it is going to move forward, it'll do so by finding a better president.]

We would be hard pressed to find anyone who cares more about SIUC or has done more than Glenn Poshard. [The writer needed to cite one or two achievements here. As to Poshard's caring, this is the emotive rather than substantive problem again. You can care a lot about something and destroy it anyway.] He is certainly not without his warts but to nit-pick improper or missing citations in a dissertation written 23 years ago, and approved by faculty, is petty and mean spirited. [Image of a nit-picker picking a wart not pretty... We're talking about vast uncited stretches of prose; doesn't matter how long ago it happened; faculty approval only deepens the scandal.]


I am tired [I feel... I am tired... Trust me: No one cares.] of this divisive, constantly attacking culture we seem to have fallen into. [Breaking out into vast cultural generalization is a real mistake here. Along with the hankie-shredding, it makes the reader suspect that you don't really have a substantive case and are trying to distract her attention from this by going cosmic.] Whether its [Apostrophe missing.] national politics or local gossip we have become so focused on the politics of destruction [Thunderous cliche.] versus getting something done it's no wonder people walk around in a borderline depression. [Hey baby, I'm fine. I don't walk around depressed. And my position on the Poshard question will have little to do with what outcome will cheer you up.] My best recommendation is to tackle the real issues and move on. This issue does not deserve the ink or time it's generating.

Labels: SOS

'In the beginning, Ed McMinn knew that at the University of Alabama, football was like religion.

And that prayer factors in quite heavily.

“There may be quite a bit of prayer that goes on, especially when Alabama is facing fourth down in the last minutes of the ball game,” McMinn said.

So he decided to combine the “two things that many people are passionate about — college sports and their faith” — to write the book God Bless the Crimson Tide: Devotions for the Die-hard Alabama Fan.

A collection of 90 stories from sports played at the University of Alabama, the book includes a Bible verse for each of the stories.

The end of the book concludes with a “replay” of the major points of each devotion.



“God is extremely persistent,” McMinn said, recounting how he had the idea for the book for a while before he got around to writing it.

McMinn, who spent most of his life in the newspaper business as a reporter and editor, taught journalism in college before becoming a minister at a non-denominational church in Terry, Ga.

He entered seminary when he was 52 years old.

Now he has gone from Methodist minister to non-denominational minister and book author.

“I guess I can claim that the book was divine inspiration,” McMinn said. “I was raised in the south. I grew up in Georgia, and I’ve always been a sports fan, especially of college football.”

A secret? He’s really a University of Georgia alumnus and fan, but the publishers wanted him to focus on Alabama and Tennessee first. (McMinn also wrote God Bless the Vols.)


McMinn said he would first find stories of faith, success, loving others and other inspirational topics about Alabama sports teams and coaches, then go look for scripture that complimented those stories. [The writer means complemented.]

“Football in this part of the country is a big thing. But other sports are in there,” McMinn pointed out. “You cannot do a book about Alabama sports without doing gymnastics. “

And from gymnastics to volleyball, figures and teams from the pages of Alabama sports history come to life, filled with passion and faith. [Cliches.] Bear Bryant is, of course, included, as well as Gene Stallings and Sarah Patterson, as well as other, lesser-known names.

“It comes at a good time for Alabama,” McMinn said of the book, and the hopes and prayers of Alabama fans for a good season. “The Alabama folks are really excited with the hiring of (head football coach) Nick Saban.”



Gary Cramer, director of the Fellowship of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes for UA [How's that again?], said that one of his favorite quotes from the book was from Senator Jeremiah Denton, who at one time said, “We believe that on the eighth day the Lord created the Crimson Tide.”

“That’s not necessarily a theologically correct statement, but true to the heart of the Crimson Tide fan,” Cramer said. “The book is just a real relative way of tying in scripture to some of the great stories of Alabama [UD doesn't get what the speaker means by calling it a real relative way.], and some of the truths that have occurred over the years. It was very entertaining to read as he ties it into scripture and encourages people on their daily walk.”

The book, which was published by Howard Books, the Christian book arm of Simon and Schuster, was not initially about the University of Alabama. [To be verbs and redundancy are making the writer's walk a little labored here. Possible rewrite: Published by Howard Books, Simon and Schuster's Christian imprint, God Bless the Crimson Tide was not at first about Alabama.] He initially [redundant] wrote about — brace yourself if you’re a Tide fan — Auburn, before he pitched the book idea to publishers. [Four uses of the word "book" in two sentences.]

But the Auburn University library was the closest college library to Terry, Ga., where McMinn lives, he noted in his defense. He was able to go there to de [typo] research on his off time.

McMinn said he hopes the book serves as a way to connect with people who might not otherwise read devotionals, as well as those who already practice faith.

“For too long there’s been a disconnect,” McMinn said.

“You go to church on Sunday, you practice your faith on Sunday and forget about it the rest of the week. Of course that’s not the way it should be. This was a way to connect people.”

More SEC schools are on McMinn’s list to write about next, but for now, he hopes Alabama fans enjoy the book.

“It is my prayer that it reaches many audiences,” he said.'

Amen. [Editorial comment doesn't belong in a news story.]

Labels: SOS

Labels: SOS

'As the season plays out, time will tell if Michigan's stunning loss to Appalachian State was a defining moment or merely a hiccup....

...When it happens so obviously right smack dab in front of 109,218 pairs of eyes and a couple dozen more on the Big Ten Network, against Appalachian State, that's a different story.

...The previous high-water mark for I-AA teams was win by The Citadel over Arkansas in 1992. Hogs' coach Jack Crowe was fired on the spot.

Some distressed UM loyalists think Carr merits the same fate.

...But Carr has enjoyed considerable success and has earned the right to go out on his terms at his time. He will never live down the loss to Appalachian State, but he deserves the opportunity to steer his team out from under it.

...Gregg Brandon: It's easy to play by the book. You score in overtime, trail by one, kick the extra point and proceed to another overtime period.

It was sheer genius, and called for a heavy dose of guts, for Bowling Green to go for a two-point conversion and the win in the first OT at Minnesota on Saturday night. It was genius because it worked, but the right call even had it not.

Brandon knew his Falcons were reeling. Minnesota scored 24 unanswered points and BG had just 125 total yards in the second half before driving 63 yards for a game-tying field goal in the waning seconds of regulation. The Gophers scored effortlessly to begin overtime. BG's defense was dog tired and on its heels and Brandon knew it.

So he put the ball in the hands of his best player - quarterback Tyler Sheehan was an astounding 34-of-51 for 388 yards in his first college start - and rolled the dice. Nice call.

...Notre Dame had 121 yards of total offense and three turnovers in a 33-3 loss to visiting Georgia Tech. Weis had a quarterback controversy even before that game; now, he has a dire mess heading to Penn State. He'll no doubt sink or swim with Jimmy Clausen, who has the best arm, from here out.'

Labels: SOS

I write this letter as a taxpayer! [A taxpayer who uses exclamation marks!]

As a taxpayer [I said it again!], I am outraged [Bursting with pride and outrage!] by this self-anointed, holier than thou [Proud, proud cliches!] group calling themselves the Alumni and Faculty against Corruption at SIU. I am outraged [Dear Letter-Writer: SOS finds your ability to experience intense emotion over and over again exciting! She is panting!] they are trying to destroy a good man [John Wayne talk.] but don't have the guts [JW again.] to identify themselves. In my opinion [Dear L.W.: You can't start out fully extended and then all of a sudden shrink into in my opinion. Gotta keep it up. Try Here's the deal or Wake up suckers BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!], they are cowards of the worst kind. I challenge these cowards to publicly identify themselves! [You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you!] I challenge each one to turn over every dissertation, thesis or other academic paper they have written in the last 30 years for review. I have found over the years that people who hide their identities may be hiding something dishonest, unethical or even illegal in their past. [Ooh, now you're scaring me.]


Read my lips, you cowards! I pay your salary to teach [That taxpayer thing again.], not to spend your time searching a 23-year-old dissertation, which was approved by a review committee 23 years ago, looking for quotation marks to destroy the reputation of a good man. Is it possible you hide because you may have used taxpayer resources illegally in your witch hunt? [Read my lips... witch hunt... This man does not mince words!]

If these gutless geniuses refuse to publicly identify themselves, then I would urge the SIU Board of Trustees to find out who they are and whether they might have acted unethically or even illegally. I, and every other Southern Illinois taxpayer, have a right to this information.

Finally, Alumni and Faculty against Corruption at SIU, look in the mirror and you might find the real corruption staring back at you.

Charles R. Garnati, Carterville


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Enough is enough

To the Editor:

Once again SIU is embroiled in controversy [Cliche, but let it go.]. This time over a 24-year-old Ph.D. dissertation by SIU President Glenn Poshard. The paper contains unattributed passages. The critics have a point: plagiarism is inimical to the academic enterprise. [Good - acknowledges some legitimacy on the other side.] But, in the annals of plagiarism, this appears to be small beer [The figurative language is making things a bit weird... annals... small beer...]. His academic committee, using information that was [Drop that was.] available to them at the time, granted the Ph.D. Poshard then went on to a brilliant career as a state Senator, a U.S. Congressman and a candidate for governor of Illinois. He then turned back to academia and rose to president of SIU. Arguably, he is one of the most illustrious graduates of SIUC in its history. [Yes, this is arguable. Also sad.]

I think we need to keep this in mind as we reflect on the continued turmoil at this university. From Jo Ann Argersinger's dismissal to Walter Wendler's firing to the hoax in the DE over a fictitious Iraq veteran, the university's name and reputation has taken a brutal beating.

The university community is in danger of devouring itself in these endless controversies. Meanwhile, its core mission of educating deserving students from the middle class in a world-class research environment is threatened.

It's time to move on and press for the things that will make SIUC the best university that it is [Drop that it is.] possible to have in this day and age [Thundering cliche.]. Let's argue about better classrooms and maintenance, better salaries for staff and faculty, better neighborhoods and a safer city. Let's support the students as they struggle through debt and the state's indifference to higher education.

And let's support Poshard. He's earned it. [Letter #1 came on too strong; this one comes on too weak. Cliches, unnecessary words, and insufficient confidence in the tone make the whole thing small beer. It moves unsteadily from unpersuasive assertion -- Poshard's brilliance -- to vague generalities about the purpose of a university. The writer, most damagingly, fails to see the connection between the state's indifference to its universities and a tradition of political hacks like Poshard running them. ]

D. Gorton, Carbondale

SOS summarizes: Complete lack of substance in both letters.

Labels: SOS

I think [Drop I think] academia honors bans against professor-student relationships more in theory than in practice, because if professors and students couldn’t hook up, the professorate [sic] would go extinct.

Now, I think we can almost all agree that dating a student while he or she is in your class is inappropriate – but what about students not in your class, but with whom you might have to otherwise professionally interact? [Clotted up with various style problems. Overuse of to be verbs; too many weasel words, as in another use of I think; an awkward split infinitive in to otherwise professionally interact.] When I think [Another I think.]of all the seemingly [Drop seemingly.] happily married couples that I know who started out as faculty advisor and graduate student advisee, the line starts to blur.

Look at it this way: most academics’ social universes could be bound in a nutshell and within that nutshell, many of the individuals are already married. So, if you’re still single upon entering academia, you really feel the pinch. And, then you put professors with students who have common interests. For example, as shocking as it might sound, both political science professors and political science majors tend to be very interested in politics. The rules seek to discourage any attractions that develop. It’s like academia is a dating agency in the ironic punishments division of Hell. [In principle, this is amusing and charming. But his heavy-handed writing style, his tendency to gum things up with too many words and phrases, keeps the lightness from appearing.]

Labels: SOS

'Blogs: All the Noise that Fits

The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute
for the patient fact-finding of reporters.

By Michael Skube
August 19, 2007


The late Christopher Lasch [Great so far. UD, who knew Lasch a little when she taught at the University of Rochester, and who, long before she met him, admired his work, always welcomes his name.] once wrote that public affairs generally and journalism in particular suffered not from too little information but from entirely too much. What was needed, he argued, was robust debate. Lasch, a historian by training but a cultural critic by inclination, was writing in 1990, when the Internet was not yet a part of everyday life and bloggers did not exist.


Bloggers now are everywhere among us, and no one asks if we don't need more full-throated advocacy on the Internet. [No one and then don't are awkward together here.] The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.

And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. "No man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said [Stubbornly sensible is hokey.], "ever wrote but for money." Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. [What we now know of how this piece was written makes the cynicism of this view of writing all the greater, pointing it directly at Skube, who in exchange for money let editors seriously fuck with his prose.] And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post -- are insistent partisans in political debate. Some reject the label "journalist," associating it with what they contemptuously call MSM (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of "citizen journalist" dedicated to broader democratization.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whose popular blog Daily Kos has been a force among antiwar activists, cautioned bloggers last week "to avoid the right-wing acronym MSM." It implied, after all, that bloggers were on the fringe. To the contrary, he wrote, "we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we're selling."

Moulitsas foresees bloggers becoming the watchdogs that watch the watchdog: "We need to keep the media honest, but as an institution, it's important that they exist and do their job well." The tone is telling: breezy, confident, self-congratulatory. Subtly, it implies bloggers have all the liberties of a traditional journalist but few of the obligations. [So subtly that UD fails to see anything like this in the Moulitsas statement.]

There is at least some reason for activists like Moulitsas to see themselves as the new wave. Last year, the California 6th District Court of Appeal gave bloggers the legal victory they wanted when it ruled that they were protected under the state's reporter shield law. Other, more symbolic victories have come their way too. In 2004, bloggers were awarded press credentials to the Democratic National Convention. And earlier this month in Chicago, at a convention sponsored by Daily Kos, a procession of Democratic presidential hopefuls offered full salutes, knowing that bloggers are busy little bees in organizing political support and fundraising. [Busy little bees = They're so gay.]

And yet none of this makes them journalists, even in the sense Lasch seemed to be advocating.

"What democracy requires," Lasch wrote in "The Lost Art of Argument," "is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can only be generated by debate. We do not know what we need until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy."

There was something appealing about this argument -- one that no blogger would reject -- when Lasch advanced it almost two decades ago. But now we have the opportunity to witness it in practice, thanks to the blogosphere, and the results are less than satisfying. One gets the uneasy sense [less than satisfying... one gets the uneasy sense... These vaguely British locutions, coupled with the Samuel Johnson mention, tell you that Skube wants his style to be what he considers non-bloggy -- profound, weighty with gravitas, for the ages. But he's writing for the LA Times.] that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect [Er, suspend?] judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.

But they are, more often than not, trademarks of the kind of journalism that makes a difference. And if there is anything bloggers want more than an audience, it's knowing they are making a difference in politics. They are, to give them their due, changing what is euphemistically called the national "conversation." But what is the nature of that change? Does it deepen our understanding? Does it broaden our perspective? [Old Grandad prose again. And again, the problem is that people who want to deepen and broaden understanding don't write op/eds for the LA Times.]

It's hard to answer yes to such questions, if only because they presuppose a curiosity and inquiry for which raw opinion is ill-suited. Sometimes argument -- a word that elevates blogosphere comment to a level it seldom attains on its own -- gains from old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. Compelling examples abound. On the same day I read of the Daily Kos convention in Chicago, I finished "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation," winner this year of the Pulitzer Prize for history. No one looms larger in the book by Gene Roberts Jr. and Hank Klibanoff than Claude Sitton, whose reporting in the New York Times in the 1960s would become legendary. [Cliches abounding.]

Full disclosure: I once worked for Sitton at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., after he had left the Times, and I knew that he and others, including Karl Fleming, had put themselves in harm's way simply to report a story. I naively asked Sitton once if he had encountered veiled threats. "Veiled?" he asked. "They were more than veiled."

He recounted the time in Philadelphia, Miss., when "a few rednecks -- drunk, shotguns in the back of their truck -- showed up at the Holiday Inn where Fleming and I were staying." The locals invited the big-city reporters -- Sitton from the Times, Fleming from Newsweek -- to come out and see the farm. "I told 'em, 'Look, you shoot us and there'll be a dozen more just like us in the morning. You going to shoot them too?' " [John Wayne bullshit.]

When I knew him, Sitton seldom mentioned those dangers of 20 years earlier. What mattered was the story, and the people swept up in it. But it was his vivid, detailed reporting that, as Roberts and Klibanoff write, caught the attention of the Kennedy White House and brought the federal government to intervene in a still-segregated South.

In our time, the Washington Post's reporting, in late 2005, of the CIA's secret overseas prisons and its painstaking reports this year on problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center -- both of which won Pulitzer Prizes -- were not exercises in armchair commentary. The disgrace at Walter Reed, true enough, was first mentioned in a blog, but the full scope of that story could not have been undertaken by a blogger or, for that matter, an Op-Ed columnist, whose interest is in expressing an opinion quickly and pungently. Such a story demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It's not something one does as a hobby. [Gotta get paid, baby.]

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.'

Labels: SOS

'Not All College Education is In the Classroom

There is at least one aspect of this Hoover High School investigation that does not seem in doubt: At least one grade was changed, and that grade change enabled a football player to become eligible to play at the college level.

Josh Chapman apparently missed being eligible under NCAA minimum standards by the narrowest of margins.

Unfortunately for Chapman and Alabama, being "barely" ineligible is kind of like being pregnant: Either you are or you aren't. And Chapman, according to the correct transcript, wasn't.

That's the problem with having standards. [There's a refreshing village-idiot quality to this piece... That's the problem with having standards...] The NCAA has a minimum standard that is supposed to draw the line that determines whether an athlete has a reasonable chance to do the work necessary to get a college degree.

But like most such standards, the numbers are arbitrary. [Everything's subjective.] I've known athletes who graduated near the top of their high school class who struggled in college, and others who were accepted as "special admissions" - in the days when schools could take one or two athletes who didn't meet minimum standards - who wound up becoming outstanding students. It often depends on what they go to college for. [Each case is special. Everything's arbitrary. You wouldn't want to consult graduation statistics, grades, test scores, and shit like that.]

I do not know Chapman, so I can't speak to his motivation for attending college. [His total fuckupery as a high school student tells you nothing.] But I have met many athletes whose primary interest in attending college was to get an education not in the classroom but in football or basketball. These athletes' ambition was to play sports at the highest level for as long as possible. [So why did they go to college, where they have, like, classrooms?]



Is that really so wrong? No less than Princeton Athletics Director Gary Walters made the argument last spring that participation in athletics should be given the same status as playing in the band, or performing drama, or getting a degree in art - all endeavors in which students can take classes and get academic credit. Shouldn't football players, Walters seems to suggest, get some kind of academic credit for playing football? [You haven't yet told us why playing football is equivalent to academic training in the arts. And nobody gets a degree for playing in the band.]

Walters quoted Jon Veach, a starting tailback on the Princeton football team who wrote a paper that said: "The reason athletes put so much time and dedication into athletics is because the athletes do not view varsity athletics as simply an extracurricular activity but rather a vital part of their life and an intense learning experience. I have been an athlete since I was eight years old, and I can honestly say that the summation of my athletic experiences to this point has prepared me for the hard times of my life better than any other experience. Varsity athletics are imbedded with an abundant number of life lessons, values, and striking comparisons to the real world. I believe so strongly in these values that I feel varsity athletes should be given some type of academic credit for the countless hours of training and learning." [To be sure, a cursory reading of this blog -- or your daily news feed -- reveals the profound values college and professional sports imbed in so many of their participants. Glance at a few headlines to grasp the life lessons our sports heroes have absorbed... UD proposes that rather than make football an arts performance major, we make it an Ethics major.]

Of course, playing at Princeton is a far cry from playing at Auburn or Alabama. And the potential for abuse in rewarding academic credit for athletics - or even the idea of creating majors based on athletic participation - gives academicians the willies. [What's the matter with these dour academicians? Don't worry! Be happy!]

But if playing football is why some kids go to college, and the ability to play football is the primary reason many colleges award scholarships (and accept minimum academic standards in return), then is Walters' idea really so far off base?' [Again, refreshing. Admits that some football players only go to college to play football. The solution to this isn't to change college into a football training facility. It is to find a place to stash these guys -- far, far away from colleges -- until they can play on professional teams.]

Labels: SOS

When Football Players Go Bad

By Lyndon Collins

'A while back I sold a restored car and got a check for $5,241. It was the most money I’d ever had. For a poor kid like me, who considers a bowl of rainbow sorbet and rented porn a delicacy, $5,241 may as well have been seven ka-billion dollars. [We've got a charmer on our hands. Rented porn a delicacy alone is worth the price of admission.]


There were limitless possibilities for this seemingly endless supply of money. [I'd drop seemingly.] The spending spree I went on was monumental. I lost my fucking mind. I wasted money on everything from a $150 ping-pong paddle (seriously), [Drop seriously.] to $30 hair gel from one of those fancy-pants hair salons. My hair has never had so much body, so much life. It glowed. One time, I even bought shots for a girl and seven of her friends if she showed me her boobs, when I could have gotten the same action at a strip club for a buck (which I did later that night anyway)...I digress. [Drop I digress.]

Of all the ridiculously stupid things I did with my money, [Drop ridiculously.] one thing I didn’t do was sponsor a dog-fighting ring out of my house. This makes me exponentially smarter than Mike Vick  —  who apparently has the intelligence of your average pube hair. [Fine, this is juvenile. He's allowed one or two of these.]

Being the all-knowing, ever-seeing, devilishly good-looking, cocky fucker [The writer puts bashful little stars over the u's in all of his uses of the word fuck. UD's removed them.] that I am, it’s hard for me to criticize someone for being arrogant, but Mike Vick makes me look like the Dali Lama.


Athletes are a different breed of people. By their very nature they are a confident, sometimes cocky, bunch  —  they have to be. Performing in front of thousands, sometimes millions, of spectators takes a certain kind of confidence that most people just don’t have. And while that confidence is great for throwing touchdowns, it can also be a recipe for disaster and embarrassment. [He's young. He's already a very good writer. He'll learn to excise all the to be verbs that are gumming this up.]

Mike Vick had three things that never mix well: amazing talent, a shit-ton of money, and glowing arrogance. [Shit-ton's fun.] This combination is getting Vick a free 18-month vacation to prison. But Vick isn’t alone in his dangerously obvious arrogance.


I love college football. Moreover, I love Ohio State football. If it weren’t for college football I would kill myself every autumn. [There's a pleasant absurdity to the seasonal suicide idea.] The first fallen leaf is a reminder of the frozen drudgery that looms in the coming months. [Drop in the coming months.] But the prospect of drunken Saturdays and screaming ‘til I can’t speak keeps the razor blade from ever piercing a vein. [Lovely.] And while I love Ohio State football, some of their players REALLY worry me.

I would never be so silly as to pretend to know all 100 (or whatever) players on the football team, but I’ve had my share of run-ins. I’m sure that most of them are fine student-athletes who do very little to tarnish the reputation of themselves or the University, but every once in a while a player shows Clarett-like qualities that scare the shit out of me. [Clarett-like qualities. It's poetic.]


I once had a class with an unnamed-but-easily-recognizable football player. He was hard to miss. Before each class he stood out in front of the building laughing obnoxiously, cursing loudly, and grabbing his crotch with a bothersome frequency. [Drop the adverbs -- obnoxiously, loudly. I love the jarring formality of bothersome frequency. It's clever to play with your tone a bit.]

As if annoying the entire campus outside of the building wasn’t enough, he usually spent most of the class talking with his buddies and disrupting the whole class. [Don't repeat class.]

One time the professor actually had to stop class to ask him and his friends to be quiet. The class was in Hitchcock. The player was sitting in the balcony...he was being that loud. [Drop being.]

This guy never brought as much as a pencil to class. I never missed a class, took every note, studied my ass off and still only got a C. It could be that I’m just really, really dumb (and I am)...but then again, I didn’t spend my whole life getting pounded in the head by 300-pound linemen. [Drop (and I am).] Apparently the little brown-haired jock-sniffer that followed him around campus took really good notes for him. I’m sure he [pronoun reference?] didn’t have a problem passing the course. Am I just jealous? Yes, yes I am.

People like our unnamed football player and Mike Vick annoy the shit out of me. They think that their athletic ability and money puts them above the standard.


I know what you’re thinking...”Money?!?! How does a college football player have so much money?” Hell if I know. But you don’t have to be an NCAA investigator to drive by the Woody Hayes Athletic center during football practice. The parking lot looks like a Cadillac dealership. And I won’t even go into the platinum chains and diamond earrings that decorate some of our more eccentric players.

I can’t stress enough that I’m sure that a vast majority of the players for our fine football program are upstanding models of academia. [Redundancy here okay because he means to lay it on thick.] But it only takes one arrogant and talented asshole to bring a story like Mike Vick’s to our own campus.

An important part of life is knowing what you have to lose. A loser like me can drink, smoke, curse in public, and spend my hard-earned money on hookers, [See how nicely he returns to his first paragraph? Good instincts.] and no one would ever care. But when you truly have something to lose and everyone is watching, maybe you ought to act like you have some fucking sense.'

Labels: SOS

'It's not easy being a billionaire, apparently. You think ahead. Work hard. Build a business. Grow the business. Create jobs. Make billions. Give a lot of the money away. All good, right?

No, sir.

You've got to give it to the right people. It doesn't matter that it's your money. It doesn't matter that your vision built that fortune. If you give the money away as you see fit, well, then, gentlemen such as Nathan Tublitz come along to tell you how indecorous you really are. [I'm steamed! Signed, Disgusted! I mean, the guy's not even working up to the rage and the insults. It doesn't occur to Mike that most people think it actually matters a great deal what you do with large sums of money. It matters how you make it (working conditions for Nike employees around the world aren't merely a matter of what Phil Knight feels like making them) and it matters how you spend it.... Of course we can't dictate to Knight's twin, T. Boone Pickens, that he not give 165 million dollars to Oklahoma State University for the exclusive use of the sports teams there; but we can certainly do what Nathan Tublitz is doing in regard to Knight, which is criticize such choices harshly. We can point out that, like Pickens, Knight will increase the corruption of the program because the size of his gift will mean he can basically run it as he likes. We can point out that Oklahoma State University is a third-tier school kept there by the anti-intellectualism of powerful people like T. Boone Pickens, etc. All of this and more Mike should think about before he begins shouting.]

You know who Phil Knight is, most likely. He's the guy who built the Nike empire after attending the University of Oregon and running track for the Ducks. His love for the university and appreciation for what his sporting background helped do for him led Knight recently to donate $100 million to the athletic department, which reportedly will help to fund a replacement basketball arena for the esteemed -- but crumbling -- McArthur Court.

You probably don't know who Nathan Tublitz is. I can't say for sure, but this seems to trouble him. [Here Mike offers his psychoanalysis of Tublitz. Tublitz, fundamentally, is jealous. He wants to be rich and famous like Phil Knight. His opposition to bigtime campus sports stems from these psychological problems.] Tublitz is an Oregon biology professor who is co-chairman of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a self-appointed group of professors that presumes to tell universities who they should be admitting and athletic departments how they should be operating. [Yes, Mike's annoyed that professors complain about special admits who will never ever ever graduate. Mike doesn't care that these guys don't graduate, because he doesn't care about universities. He cares about sports. And he really dislikes people who care about universities.]

And now, Tublitz is telling Knight how to spend his money.

"The priorities of the university are totally out of whack when so much money can go to an ancillary activity of the university when the rest of the university goes begging," Tublitz told The Oregonian about Knight's gift.

Tublitz is registering his ire with Oregon, but the university really only had two choices when Knight called to offer the chance to bathe in his largesse: yes or no. [Mike, Mike. Your monomania has kept you from learning about university philanthropy. It's quite common for universities to advise alumni on how they might best direct their gift. In fact, it's not unknown for universities to turn down all or part of gifts which alumni donors insist must go in directions the university for whatever reason doesn't think they should go. This is called integrity, Mike. All universities have it, or should have it.] Any other response would have been more than a little presumptuous. One does not keep one's relationships intact by opening the Christmas present and saying, "Great, but I'd much rather have a Rolex." [What sort of relationships do you keep intact by passively acceding to everything your friend demands?]

In fact, Knight has given many more millions to his alma mater, money that helped build a law school building, renovate the library and endow academic chairs. As if to prove he's as much a fan of higher education as hoops, he also dropped $105 million on Stanford's business school, where he long ago earned an MBA. [Mike's first good points. He's buried them in this paragraph, though, and he's about to leave them.]

Tublitz and the group he fronts, however, have an obvious animus toward collegiate athletics. When they issued a report in June that essentially called for universities to make their athletic teams more in line with their student bodies, I wrote an e-mail to him and posed the question of why, indeed, athletes aren't treated more like other students in similar disciplines. I asked why students who major in theater, dance and music are presented academic credit and degrees in those subjects, whereas athletes do similar work in their sports are said to be performing strictly extracurricular activities.

His response was so revealing:

"You seem to have a bit of a misunderstanding of the fundamental bases of academics. Art, music, theater, and dance are serious academic disciplines; they are not a game. If you believe that their subjects are only 'entertainment,' you might consider taking an art history, music theory, theater staging or physics of dance course at an accredited university. These courses are academically rigorous and packed full with serious academic content, something not present in any athletic endeavor." [UD would have been a mite less condescending. On the other hand, Mike's confusion is pretty amazing.]

This is the kind of attitude sports frequently confront within a campus setting. It does not matter that the coaches who work for colleges study their sport and innovate within their sport with as much rigor as any ballet teacher or voice instructor. [LOL] It does not matter that the public and the university community, on the whole, place an obvious value in what the coaches and athletes are creating for them. [Everybody loves us!] You've still got professors such as Tublitz demeaning their work -- dismissively calling basketball or football "a game," as if it's no more sophisticated than Parchesi. [What are we supposed to call it? A Socratic dialogue?]

When a person with this approach makes a public statement about athletics, he or she should be taken no more seriously than the person who looks at a Picasso and claims the guy just didn't know how to draw.'

Labels: SOS

BREAKING OUT THE WOODEN PROSE-O-METER [Starts with an absolutely terrible title. There's nothing clever here, and it's also rather confusing as to meaning.]

There was a curious detail in The New Yorker's recent, none-wished-it-longer profile of real estate and media tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman. The longtime chairman [Repetition of longer/longtime not good.] of Boston Properties, Zuckerman writes a weekly column for U.S. News & World Report, which he owns. Here is how he goes about it:

"Generally, Zuckerman reads up on his column subjects on the weekends, underlining as he goes. He writes early in the week, dictating a first draft of the column over the phone to a secretary in Mexico City. She transcribes his musings, and sends them to him; he fiddles and dictates anew, until he has a workable draft."

Inhale. These New Yorker paragraphs run on for ever. Exhale. [Inhale/Exhale fun, but you kind of have to think about it.]

"('I wish that I could write with metaphors, but I just try to marshal the facts as well as I can,' he said.) Then, typically, he sends it to Harry Evans, the eminent newspaperman and publisher. Characterizations of Evans's contribution vary, depending on which former editor of the magazine you talk to. Evans calls his round 'a conventional dust job.'"

Wow. Phoned down to Mexico City; more fiddling and dictating; multiple drafts; touched up by the legendary former editor of the London Sunday Times. [The wow's good. And he's already insinuating that all this fiddling actually isn't wow.]

So why are the columns so bad? How come they read as if -- metaphor comes naturally to me -- they were written with a trowel? [Trowel's great, as in just lays it on.]

How bad are Zuckerman's columns? They are pretty awful, a solid 8.7 on the Wooden Prose-o-Meter, where the typical Eleanor Clift or Clarence Page outing scores a perfect 10. [The o-meter thing just isn't working here. Too tired. It is itself a species of woodenness.] They are awful because they are boring and predictable, which is the last thing an opinion column should be.

Let's flit through some recent work. Zuckerman offers up a dutiful, by-the-numbers hand-wringing about Don Imus: "Imus has helped reset the boundaries of acceptable speech. But we must go further, reawakening awareness of the unmet needs of our society." [Great selection. How much more pompous and vapid can you get than the unmet needs of our society?] And of course an in-crowd abrazo for New York mayor Michael Bloomberg: "He has governed in a common-sense, adult, nonideological manner." Doubtless it is so. [Abrazo's embrace. Nice offbeat word. Good. But I'm not sure his "Doubtless it is so" is doing the work he means it to do -- I mean, being sarcastic. It's not quite strong enough.]

Separately, Zuckerman frets over the disturbing political insurgency of Senator Barack Obama: "He must grow." Of course he frets big-time over the Hamas insurgency in Gaza and the West Bank. Zuckerman saves his worst writing for the subject he cares about most -- the state of Israel -- because he fancies himself a player in Mideast politics. To wit: "The stakes are high. This is a time not for rolling the dice but for prudent, tough-minded diplomacy and realism. Or else we are doomed to repeat the past failures." What? No "Time will tell"? Perhaps that was in a previous column. [Excellent. I giggled a bit at this ridicule of the stupefying cliches Zuckerman's elaborately-edited work produces.]

Zuckerman writes with the moribund evenhandedness of someone worried that he might not be invited back to A-list dinner parties. [Here's where satirists need to be careful. The sentence is great until Beam gets to A-list dinner parties, which is itself a cliche, and a rather dumb populist one at that.] Which is curious, since he hosts about one-half of them. On Israel, I'd much rather read Marty Peretz from the right or Eric Alterman from the left. To paraphrase the Book of Revelations, Zuckerman on the Middle East is neither hot nor cold; I spew him out.

Maybe I should ease up on the former Hub resident who calls Cambridge a "suburb" of Boston; did U.S. News fire all the fact-checkers too? The fact is that any jackass can write an opinion column and many do. [Repetition of fact not so hot; also, he needs a transition -- maybe a new paragraph -- to the jackass point.] Zuckerman's work matches up nicely with syndicated scribblers like Susan Estrich, Bill O'Reilly, or the Emperor of All Received Wisdom, David Gergen. [Again, Emperor, etc., just falls flat. It's too broad a species of satire.] When I applied for a fellowship years ago, the first words out of my mouth were: "I am a newspaper columnist, but that doesn't mean I am an idiot." [Probably should have begun the piece with this.]

So who does columns right? Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, whom I don't get to read often, may be the best reporter/writer/commentator at a big newspaper. Ron Rosenbaum at the weekly New York Observer could really cook. Whether writing about Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, or Yale's secret society Skull and Bones, Rosenbaum pursued ideas to the very end, with fussy, envy-inducing prose. [Not sure fussy's the right word here.]

Michael Kinsley is probably the best newspaper columnist of my generation, but he's really a magazine guy, so we don't have to feel threatened.

Me? Let others judge. I'd love to hold forth longer, but I have to phone some of these thoughts down to Mexico City. [Very good. Nicely revisits this absurdity.] These deadlines creep up quicker than a bobcat with slippers on. Oh, look -- a metaphor! I must be doing something right. [Actually, I think that's a simile...]

THE WORST OP-ED EVER WRITTEN? [Again, a terrible title. Unless the essay to come is the cleverest, most definitive decimation of a piece of writing ever. Which it's not. One reason it's not, right up front: Cast your eye down the page. It's way too long. You want to get in and get out of these things pretty quickly -- after all, they're talking about a short, pretty superficial bit of prose; and the more you rant on, the more the thing seems to be about you, which is death on wheels for this sort of writing. It shouldn't be about your resentment or irritation or disdain; it should be about the prose.]



It was Aug. 5, and Professor Stanley Fish, the famous postmodernist and "guest columnist" [Already the bizarre and unhelpful use of quotation marks. Why the marks? Does he mean to suggest that Fish isn't a guest columnist? That guest columnist is a pretentious formulation? WHAT?] for the New York Times, had some breaking news to expound upon in an op-ed piece. He had discovered a new development in American culture that deserved the kind of exegesis only he could deliver: the appearance of a new kind of coffee place. [Expound... exegesis... Rosenbaum thinks using these fancy words satirizes what he sees as the intellectual pomposity of Fish. But they're not working this way; they're just vague snark-markers...]

Have you heard about these new coffee places? Professor Fish's column made it seem as though they had never been noticed or discussed before. [Drop second sentence. It's sentences like this one that make this far too long a piece.]

"Getting Coffee Is Hard To Do" was the title of his essay, which in its self-satisfied cluelessness may just qualify as the worst op-ed ever written. [Rosenbaum's shooting off his guns far too soon. And he's telling rather than showing -- he's name-calling rather than doing what, say, Christopher Hitchens does so well -- cunningly, calmly, working the prose of his adversary so as to expose, amid gradually building hilarity on the part of the reader, its stupidity.] (I'm not sure if "Worst Ever" will become a recurrent feature in this space, but my column on "The Worst Celebrity Profile Ever Written" (Esquire's pretentiously fawning profile of "the best woman in the world," Angelina Jolie) stirred up some useful controversy.) [Bad idea to mention in a self-aggrandizing way an earlier column he's written along these lines. Makes this one look like a lazy effort to replicate that success.]

At the very least, Fish's column showcases what happens when certain academics descend from the ivory tower to offer us their special insights on popular culture. [UD's got nothing against anti-professor rhetoric, but this is really meager stuff.]

Not that Fish would cop to living in a tower. The professor took great pains to demonstrate that he is not one of those academics who mingle among the commoners for a mere 20 minutes or so before pronouncing on their baffling customs. [Why is the satire falling flat here? One reason is that it's simply very badly written, clogged with adjectives - great, mere, baffling - which dilute the force of the writing and account for its length.]

It seems that professor Fish is a real man of the people who has been getting his coffee served to him amidst the regular folk for years, at the kind of place where you could order your coffee and cheese Danish, and "twenty seconds later, tops, they arrived, just as you were settling into the sports page."

You can tell he's a down-to-the-earth guy, not some pointy-headed intellectual, because he uses phrases like "twenty seconds later, tops" and reads "the sports page."

But our professor seems to think he has encountered a brand-new cultural phenomenon: coffee places that are disturbingly different from the lunch counters of yesteryear.

Well, I did a little Googling, and it turns out he's right! There are hosts of these coffee chain stores, including one with the improbable name Starbucks, infiltrating our cities. I don't understand why the Times' cutting-edge "Styles" section hasn't done something on this before. Wake up and smell the coffee, "Styles" section editors! [Comes across as protesting too much, pleasing himself, stretching out to admire his irony... ]

It turns out these new coffee places are incredibly difficult to navigate, even for a brilliant academic like professor Fish.

Here's how he describes his harrowing experience: "As you walk in, everything is saying, 'This is very sophisticated and you'd better be up to it.' "

Of course, we know that professor Fish is being ironic here. Some might say condescendingly so. From his tone, we know that the elements of what he mockingly describes as "sophistication" — "wood or concrete floors, lots of earth tones, soft, high-style lighting, open barrels of coffee beans, folk-rock and indie music, photographs of urban landscapes, and copies of The Onion" — aren't true sophistication to a man of professor Fish's discernment. They're kitsch, faux-sophistication — and you can't fool him. He can see right through it! [It's quite damaging to Rosenbaum's case that this short excerpt in which Fish describes the place's interior is superior to anything Rosenbaum has so far written.]

Although at this point you begin to wonder if his op-ed wasn't meant to be a feature in The Onion ("Area professor befuddled by coffee place"), Fish is apparently serious about the profound difficulty this new cultural phenomenon presents. [Most readers have stopped reading by now. Rosenbaum is excruciating in his insistence on chewing at this prose...]

In any case, professor Fish's description of his terrifying encounter with this coffee store is enough to make a grown man weep [Wan cliche.]:

First, unlike his previous coffee shop, which evidently was never crowded, you have to get in line [!] and wait to be served for more than 20 seconds, tops. In fact, "You may have one or two people in front of you who are ordering a drink with more parts than an internal combustion engine." Oh the humanity! [DOA cliche.]

What's worse, these, these PEOPLE, whoever they are, use unfamiliar terms: "something about 'double shot,' 'skinny,' 'breve,' 'grande,' 'au lait' and a lot of other words that never pass my lips."

Not only are they unfamiliar, practically indecipherable, these terms (what could au lait possibly mean? It doesn't even sound like English!), you virtually have to sound them out to read them. They are, furthermore, literally, unspeakably vulgar to a man of educated taste. (They "never pass my lips" — imagine if a man of his intellectual distinction had to say au lait!) [Sorry baby. You're all worked up, but it ain't working. You're overdoing.]

And by the way, you satirists and improv comics out there. Why haven't you picked up on this elaborate coffee-name trend and made fun of it? That new show I've heard of, Seinfeld, could really get some mileage out of those funny names for coffee sizes. Tall is small! Comedy gold! (I myself have tangled with Starbucks, though mostly back in the day when Seinfeld was still on the air. But my tiffs were with its management, not with the 20-second-plus wait or the beleaguered baristas.)

But professor Fish's ordeal does not end with the profoundly confusing names, confusing even for someone who specializes in language. (And I should say here I am an admirer of his early, pre-postmodern work Surprised by Sin, a controversial study of Milton's Paradise Lost.) [Any reader still with Rosenbaum is befuddled at this point. Suddenly he's expressing respect -- but are we sure it's non-ironic respect? -- for Fish's scholarly work... Rosenbaum's tone is all over the place, and tone is crucial in hit pieces like this.]

No, the ordeal continues even after you master the ordering process: "[Y]ou get to put in your order, but then you have to find a place to stand while you wait for it."

Professor Fish is particularly good on the inhuman stress positions this requires of him. "[Y]ou shift your body, first here and then there, trying to get out of the way of those you can't help get in the way of."

How he maintains his priceless sense of humor in this Abu Ghraib-like environment of torment is hard to imagine. But it gets worse. You can bump into people and spill coffee, and it's hard to find a seat. I'm not kidding. (Well, he isn't.) [No selectivity here at all. Far more effective to use one or at most two of Fish's comments against him... It feels pathological for Rosenbaum to gas on like this.]

But there's more! "[T]hen your real problems begin," he says with stoic grit. Some readers, the faint of heart, may want to skip this next part, because things really get ugly: the "accessories" difficulty. (Note to self: Tell agent about plans for thriller to rival The Bourne Ultimatum — The Accessories Difficulty.)

You must face "a staggering array" of "things you put in, on and around your coffee ... " Here, he's referring to such highly fraught choices as sugar or Splenda, whole milk or skim. High stakes choices, with so little time to tease out the implications and consequences. What's more, there's no service person to help him make these terrible decisions. "[S]o you lunge after one thing and then after another with awkward reaches."

At this point, one can sympathize not so much with professor Fish as with the Times op-ed editors who had to come up with a "pull quote" for the hard-copy edition. You know, the pithy phrase that billboards the column's essence. Here's what they came up with:

"Cream? Sugar? Get it yourself."

I think that about captures the unbearable excitement of these revelations. Oh, the exquisite, um, awkwardness of those "awkward reaches"! But he "got it himself" despite the indignity. And he lived to tell about it. And make it relevant! In fact, one can see a hint of professor Fish's signature moral relativism — known in the lit-crit trade as anti-foundationalism — creep into his prose as he attempts to grapple with the accessories difficulty.

"There is no 'right' place to start," he notes, no solid philosophical foundation upon which to base difficult sweetener decisions. As with the most difficult questions of philosophy, politics, and literature, there are only subjective perspectives.

He is once again face to face with the tragedy of the human situation.

But he's got a much larger point to make. The dread "New Coffee Experience" turns out to be emblematic of one of the key ills of modern times, the servant problem:

It is "just one instance of the growing practice of shifting the burden of labor to the consumer — gas stations, grocery and drug stores, bagel shops (why should I put on my own cream cheese?), airline check-ins, parking lots."

Imagine, a man of his distinction, forced to "put on my own cream cheese." Why is there no one to do it for him?

He might have mentioned ATMs. Used to be you could walk into a bank and ask a teller to give you a couple hundred bucks, and they'd hand it over, "twenty seconds, tops." No troubling paperwork, remember? And what about credit card machines? Now, it's "insert this, swipe that, choose credit or debit, enter your PIN, push the red button, error, start again."

One wants to feel sympathy for professor Fish in his distress. But although most of the unintentional humor in professor Fish's column comes from his comic cluelessness about things he thinks are "new" in the culture, this note of entitlement gives it a kind of nasty edge. [We're totally not with the writer by now. We're not necessarily with Fish, but we're nowhere near the writer's sensibility and response. This piece became a dud in the fourth or fifth paragraph; anyone still chugging along is a marm or a Duke student whose dissertation defense Fish failed.]

He concedes toward the close of his column: "[N]one of us has chosen to take over the jobs of those we pay to serve us."

Is it just me, or is there something grating in that phrase: "those we pay to serve us"? So distasteful, the life of the servant class, compared with the life of the mind.

But at least in the old days the servant class hopped to it and got professor Fish his coffee and Danish in "20 seconds, tops" and worked themselves to the point of exhaustion all day for less than a minimum wage to make sure he would have something to consume with his "sports page."

As multidegreed as he is, I have a feeling that it would be an invaluable addition to his education if professor Fish spent a week "serving" as a barista. You know: For someone who believes in perspectives rather than foundations (except when it comes to grants), it would seem like a useful additional perspective on the whole coffee-servant question. [The parenthetical snark about grants is just mystifying.]

He also might want to consider that, while in some ways we do more ourselves these days, some of us might just prefer that to having servants? Just another perspective.

Still, the column makes clear why his kind of deep thinking has earned him academic stardom and university deanships. Such a man deserves to be served. Not to have to serve himself. [Rosenbaum doesn't believe any of this shit. He's just going with his formula.]

In any case, the op-ed may not have been a total loss; it might suggest the subject for his next magnum opus: Surprised by Starbucks.

Labels: SOS

Receivers' Suspensions a Blow to Depth [Why've they been suspended? Oh, same old shit... Doesn't matter... What matters is the blow to our depth...]

With Douglas, Bowman out, Hawks' receiving options few

By Andy Hamilton
Iowa City Press-Citizen



The receiver position on the Iowa football roster morphed from an area of concern to a source of strength for the Hawkeyes during the second half of 2006, and the excitement generated with that growth carried through the first two weeks of preseason camp. [Starts on an up note. Will also end on one. Actually, the last note will be not just up, but inspirational, intended to swerve our attention from the latest, er, unpleasantness...]

Sure, Iowa had a few causes for concern leading up to the last two weeks of preparation for the Sept. 1 season opener against Northern Illinois. But there were seemingly few questions regarding the receiver position, perhaps other than how the Hawkeyes would utilize so many young and talented players. [Not terrible writing -- and SOS likes that cozy Sure to begin the paragraph -- but note the weasel words: seemingly, perhaps. And note his use of the very ugly utilize. Always use use when tempted to use utilize. And given the charming casualness of tone he's got, a word like regarding clashes.]

Until Monday.

That's when Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz announced the indefinite suspension of sophomore receivers Dominique Douglas and Anthony Bowman after both players were arrested for unauthorized use of a credit card stemming from a May 8 incident when the Detroit natives allegedly racked up more than $2,000 in charges on two cards belonging to two separate victims, according to Johnson County District Court records. [Kind of reads like a run-on sentence; too many clauses. But it's okay.]

"The accusations are serious and, if proven to be true, are extremely disappointing for everyone associated with the University of Iowa and our football program," Ferentz said in a university-released statement. "As always, we will work with the appropriate individuals and entities on and off campus as this matter works its way through the legal system.

"As is often the case in matters of this nature, I am aware of inconsistencies in what may or may not have taken place. We need to let the legal process run its course."

[The writer simply quotes the coach - who, like most bigtime university coaches, is probably reading from very yellowed notes here - and then goes back to his anxious concern about depth.]

In the meantime, the Hawkeyes are left assessing who they have left [Repetition of left is a little clunky.] and which players slide into the roles previously held by Bowman and Douglas, Iowa's leading receiver last season.

Without Douglas and Bowman, the Hawkeyes have just two wide receivers on their roster who have caught passes at Iowa -- Brodell (45) and sophomore Trey Stross (13).

Stross sat out Saturday's scrimmage with leg soreness, although Ferentz said he expected Stross to return to practice early this week. Freshman Paul Chaney also spent time on the sidelines Saturday with a foot injury.

That left a lot of repetitions for redshirt freshmen James Cleveland and Derrell Johnson-Koulianos and true freshman Colin Sandeman.

"(The receivers) had really good practices -- about as good as I've ever had in any camp that I've ever had since I've been here," junior starter Brodell said Saturday. "We all seem to be making plays. ...We all have the potential and we all have the ability, but it's production over potential, and whoever makes the most plays on a consistent level is going to play."

Douglas had already proven to be a consistent performer. He broke Iowa freshman receiving records for catches (49) and receiving yards (654) last year when he ranked first in the country among freshmen in those categories.

Bowman played sparingly last season as a true freshman. He returned four kickoffs for 76 yard but did not catch a pass.

Both players participated Saturday when the Hawkeyes scrimmaged at Kinnick Stadium and Douglas was one of 10 players made available to the media afterward. [This is all perfectly competent sports writing. And it moves the reader's attention swiftly from the routine, uninteresting business of criminality on the team -- these two aren't the only Iowa players in trouble with the law at the moment -- to what the guy's readers really care about: Whether they can win the next game.]

Douglas started the final 11 games of 2006 for the Hawkeyes and seemed to work his way back into good graces with the team after being demoted to working with the reserves late in the spring when he was dealing with academic issues. [Academic issues is a pleasant euphemism. The graduation rate for Iowa football players is appalling. But let's not go there.]

"I messed up in school my first semester and I learned from it," Douglas said Saturday. "I'll never put myself in another position like that because I hurt myself and I hurt the team also. I'm not a selfish person and I want to get my education, that's first things first."

When asked if he was fearful of having football taken away, Douglas said: "Definitely because you love football."

Douglas said two weeks ago at Iowa's annual media day gathering that he felt he learned a lesson from having to get his academics in order.

"I feel like I've grown as human being and as a football player," he said. [Note the power of ending this piece on this resounding cliche. From the start, the article has shifted our attention from the newsworthy, scandalous aspects of this typical bigtime American football team to parochial questions of field strategy. And to make sure we forget why the team's up shit's creek, the reporter will end with this utterly false assurance from one of the players that all is well.]

Labels: SOS

'As the trial for former Texas State University [How much trouble is a university in when the Houston Chronicle gets its name wrong in the first sentence? Long, long ago, the place was called Texas State... The Chronicle reporter needs to update his files... UPDATE: And UD needs to get corrective lenses. Andre Mayer, a reader, points out that the writer says "former Texas State University." My bad. Though it seems a strange choice to start your piece about the place by using an obsolete name for it... UPDATE UPDATE: Another reader, TAFKAU, points out that former seems to refer not to the school but to the school's president... And that therefore UD is at least correct that the formulation's messy... Anyway, TAFKAU notes that the reporter has now rewritten the sentence.] President Priscilla Slade starts this week, observers expect a fight that is more contentious than the paper-heavy trial of her chief financial officer who was convicted of criminal financial mismanagement as part of the same investigation. [that is... who was... Especially in concise newspaper writing, you want to avoid these draggy to be verb formulations. Notice how the sentence reads if you simply take them out: "...a fight more contentious than the paper-heavy trial of her chief financial officer, convicted of criminal financial mismanagement..." See? Just drop them.]

And while prosecutors are expected to bring in alleged bad acts like wrongful termination of TSU employees and minor legal infractions if Slade is convicted, university supporters hope the public can separate the allegations against her from the troubled institution. [For background to this story, go here. ]

Slade, 55, is charged with two counts of misapplication of fiduciary property over $200,000. If convicted, she faces five to 99 years or life in prison for the first-degree felonies. She could also receive probation.

Slade was fired in June 2006 after a TSU investigation concluded she had failed to follow university policies and state laws while spending more than $260,000. A criminal investigation concluded that more than $1.9 million was spent during her tenure on such purchases as home furniture, artwork, club memberships, spa treatments and tickets for sporting events.

Slade's attorney, Mike DeGeurin, said other university presidents, like Slade, buy fine furniture and accessories, like crystal stemware, to entertain donors at home. He framed the expenses as reasonable and necessary to turn TSU into a "first-class university."

"Dr. Slade ordered crystal and china for Texas Southern University so that when people came to visit, they weren't drinking out of Styrofoam cups," DeGeurin said. [These being the only alternatives.] "The complaint reflects, to me, that where other universities can have nice things, TSU should not have that nice of stuff." [She's hired herself quite the eloquent advocate.]

DeGeurin said Slade was working to improve TSU, and would have shepherded the university through its current troubles.

"What TSU needs right now is someone like Dr. Slade," DeGeurin said. [TSU has endured enough thieves. It's time for it to look for administrative officers who don't steal. But so far no competent and ethical people want to work at a place that has fallen to pieces.]

He said no crime had been committed, and he isn't worried about prosecutors proving a crime.



Assistant District Attorney Julian Ramirez noted that one jury has already found that a crime was committed.

In May, Slade's former CFO, Quintin Wiggins, was convicted of the same crime and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He is appealing that conviction.

With Slade, both sides began gearing up for a bitter battle months ago.

During the monthlong Wiggins trial, prosecutors kept a fraud investigator in the courtroom and DeGeurin had a staff attorney observe the entire trial. In pretrial hearings, both sides have staked out their positions and say the gloves have come off.

Assistant District Attorney Donna Goode said the two indictments relate to about $523,000 worth of purchases that benefited Slade. Wiggins, on the other hand, was part of her plan and received little benefit, Goode said.

"The stakes are higher," Goode said. "We're now trying the alleged principal of the crime."

If Slade is convicted, prosecutors have filed a notice of "past bad acts" they will work to prove up to bolster the jury's outrage. Because of a motion that limits what they can say about these acts, neither side would discuss alleged wrongful firings of TSU employees and legal infractions.



In Slade's wake, the spending scandal left the state's largest historically black university in turmoil. Shortly after firing Slade, regents eliminated 178 jobs, or 16 percent of the workforce, in an attempt to contain costs while enrollment continued to slide.

Gov. Rick Perry later asked the regents to make "tough decisions" to turn the university around. But the board failed to offer the specific proposals necessary to correct the financial situation, prompting Perry to pressure the regents into resigning en masse in May.

The new regents are now working on a reorganization plan that should soon be forwarded to the governor and state lawmakers. The board also is making plans to replace interim President J. Timothy Boddie Jr. with another temporary leader after recently extending the search for a new president.

Enrollment, meanwhile, is expected to be down as much as 15 percent when classes resume Aug. 27, officials said.

Legislators who have supported TSU historically said they hoped the public would be able to separate the university from the scandal.

"I don't want the school to be penalized for mistakes some have made," said state Sen. Rodney Ellis. He said he hopes the public will be able to draw a distinction between the university and the crimes alleged to have been perpetrated.

State Rep. Garnet Coleman said the public hasn't learned to separate TSU from Slade.

"Priscilla Slade has done a disservice to TSU," Coleman said. "She abused the public trust, harmed the students and harmed the school."'

Labels: SOS

And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is! To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a regulated temperature — as if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As if it were not to die in one’s own lifetime, and without even the sad immunities of death! [Sad immunities of death is gorgeous poetry.] As if it were not to die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at arm’s length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber [Wonderful simile.]. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which out-lives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. [Again, notice how simple great writing tends to be. A very simple sentence here, and among the most moving of the essay's.] Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.

Labels: SOS

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question. [Funny.] When a man’s heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death may be knocking at the door, like the Commander’s statue; we have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. [Again, note the casual tone, which makes things amusing and authentic.] Passing bells are ringing all the world over. All the world over, and every hour, some one is parting company with all his aches and ecstasies. [Repetition of all the world over works well; aches and ecstasies is an attractive pair.] For us also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies. [These last phrases are beautiful, if you ask me.]

We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring about the Permanence of the Possibility, a man’s head is generally very bald, and his senses very dull, before he comes to that. Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall — a mere bag’s end, as the French say — or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind. [Incredibly long sentence. Yet it's full of charms. I particularly love pule. Pule, pule, pule. Great word. And the nasty phrase it's part of -- pule in little atheistic poetry-books -- hot stuff.] No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer [That'd be Samuel Johnson.]; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea [Again the amusing deflationary tack.] As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man’s cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world. [Sure, this is nineteenth century bootstraps stuff. SOS doesn't care. She's captured.]

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated temperature, and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body or soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. [Mad dashing prose!] Lord look after his health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim. [Swashes! A swashbuckler!] Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path [Crazy Quilt prose! But its wild vitalism is its subject... ]: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. “A peerage or Westminster Abbey!” cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post card? Who would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

Labels: SOS

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death. [pricks is the great word here.] The whole way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. [pinch. pricks. There's a casualness of word and phrase tossed in to the more formal salad of this essay which creates a nice off-balance feel.] And yet we go spinning through it all, like a party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader remembers one of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he encouraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge over Baiae bay; and when they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards among the company, and had them tossed into the sea. This is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race of man. Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even while it lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God’s pale Praetorian throws us over in the end! [Sure, this is exclamatory and overdone for our contemporary tastes... too many classical and biblical allusions, etc. And yet what's also here is a richness of thought and image that carries us along.]

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake? [His ordinary images convey quite adequately our oblivious engagement in sublunary life.] The love of Life and the fear of Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more we think about them. It is a well-known fact that an immense proportion of boat accidents would never happen if people held the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of a professional mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God’s creatures makes it fast. A strange instance of man’s unconcern and brazen boldness in the face of death!

We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We have no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others; and although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess at the meaning of the word life. [Attractive, conversational, straightforward prose.] All literature, from Job and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life [The capital letters tell you he thinks there's no such thing, and that it's pretentious to pretend otherwise.]. And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an undertaker’s man; but not certainly of abstract death. [dentist is very fine.] We may trick with the word life in its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true throughout — that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living. Into the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of providence; no man’s eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a general view of life’s possibilities and issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous of their personal safety. To be deeply interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw. [Here is the essence of Stevenson's argument.] For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.

Labels: SOS

And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. [Strong transitional phrase -- And yet, -- into this next, very long paragraph.] This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over-crowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would set it into explosion like a penny squib. [A penny squib is a cheap firecracker. Notice how this long cosmic sentence ends with a fine deflationary thud.] And what, pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards? [Pathologically here meaning scientifically. And a petard is also a firecracker. The body as a bagful of petards. Fun.] The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship’s powder-magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. [A powder-magazine is a storage room for ammunition and weapons. Note the impressive extension of the explosion image.] If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened as they make out we are [Here he elaborates on his earlier criticism of philosophers; they think we actively fear death and grasp pathetically at life.], for the subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would follow them into battle — the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship? [The blue-peter's a flag flown when a ship is ready to sail.] Think (if these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: ["the daily peril of the dinner-table" -- amusing, poetic...] a deadlier spot than any battle-field in history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left their bones! [Yes. I recently mentioned here Joan Didion's book about her husband's death - The Year of Magical Thinking - and that's just how he died -- sitting down to dinner.] What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle, and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man’s age compared to which the valley at Balaklava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday. [Well-observed, funny, though a bit of too much in terms of length. You can't have everything. ... Larkin has a bit in a poem on this subject too. From The Old Fools: For the rooms grow farther, leaving / Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear / Of taken breath, and them crouching below / Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving / How near it is. 'Extinction's alp' - very same business you see in Stevenson.] It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed.

Labels: SOS

When an unknown assailant in Palermo, Sicily, fired five shots into Nicola Ingarao on June 13, he killed the reputed boss of the Porta Nuova gang, breaking a 10-month cease-fire among the city's Mafia bands and possibly setting off a new war among them.

The killer also deprived the University of Palermo of one of its most promising nontraditional students.

A day before his murder, Mr. Ingarao, 46, passed a final exam in the history of philosophy with a perfect grade of 30.

"He was a model student, very assiduous and attentive," says the course's professor, Pietro di Giovanni. "His tone was always very polite and distinguished."

Mr. Ingarao, who was facing trial for racketeering and extortion, had been in and out of prison since 1995 for various crimes, including murder, though that conviction was overturned on appeal. He began work toward a bachelor's degree in psychology while still behind bars, and was released from custody only four months before his death.

Mr. Di Giovanni, who is chairman of an interdisciplinary department at the university called Ethos, says that Mr. Ingarao introduced himself as a toy retailer. But the professor does not find it surprising that one of his best students had a more exotic occupation.

"It is quite common for people in their 40s to take a greater interest in culture," he says. "That this person had a private life, however you want to describe it, and yet wanted to learn more about these subjects, seems to me perfectly normal."

The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man’s experience, and has no parallel upon earth. [There's something almost comical about this sentence... Yes, death certainly does change things... But it's also refreshing to read a writer who leaps into the subject in this rather naive and direct way. Why not...] It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. [See Phillip Larkin's great poem, Aubade: Most things may never happen: this one will,/ And realisation of it rages out/ In furnace fear when we are caught without/ People or drink.] Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people’s lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. [Rather florid stuff, but I like his rich images, the way he plays a figure out...] Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. [Sure, he's breaking some SOS rules -- He's wordy, and he uses evil adverbs - hurriedly, utterly... But there is something in the alternation between long sentences, and then short ones with a certain classical composure -- empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night -- that is charming to me.] Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of mediaeval Europe. [There's a richness in his examples, and a lilt in his phrases.] The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. [Again, his prose turns out to be about intriguing mixes -- in the earlier sentence, both mocking and tragical; here, grimly and ludicrous, the undertaker who parades -- it seems a way of capturing the tragicomic aspect of our life and death, our efforts to hide death, make the dead go away...] All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; [Ah. The argument approaches. Our ornate death ceremonials have in some way put us in error.] nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice. [Bit convoluted here, but he seems to be saying that our philosophers too misunderstand death and lead us astray about it. Fortunately, we don't do much thinking in the heat of human event, so we ritualize death - and live our lives, for that matter - pretty adequately.]

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances. [As long as life moves along normally, we don't think about our death.] We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. [Again, few of us in this century would write so floridly, but there's an energy and wit here that's attractive.] There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. [If you don't think Stevenson was aware of the delicious alliteration in all the M's in this sentence, think again. Great prose stylists are very self-conscious. And yes, I've highlighted said M's. Note the internal rhyme, too, in "bowels of the mountain growl."] In the eyes of very young people, and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly be relished in such circumstances without something like a defiance of the Creator. [Again, a very long sentence, but just lots of fun to be inside, no? The adorable absurdity of "with umbrellas," the freshness of "to smell of," the humble foods...] It should be a place for nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils drowning care in a perpetual carouse. [Maceration? Neither do I. But as SOS has said before on this blog, we go to great writers in part for new words, for the pleasant interior twist we feel when confronted with strange formulations... We go especially to the poet for this, but also to the great prose writer... So, I looked it up, and I think Stevenson means starving themselves.]

Labels: SOS

Jim Acho, Sports Review Magazine:

'I have received close to 1000 emails the last month, from people asking me to address this. Initially I disregarded, but it reared it's [First of many spelling errors. Dude cannot spell.] ugly head again, after a piece last week by ESPN's Pat Forde, a writer I generally respect [Pompous. Do you think we care who you do and don't respect? UD respects people who know how to spell.].

Well, its been a tumultuous two weeks for the folks at Michigan, I'm sure, having to defend itself against comments made by a once-proud alum who decided to take a cheap shot (twice) [Time to start listing the cliches... reared ugly head... once-proud... take a cheap shot...] at the nation's finest institution for blending sports and academics at a high level [Who says it's the finest? I do. End of argument. What a fool.]. This wasn't Fresno State he was chipping at, but Michigan. He took indirect shots at a program overseen by my wife [Yikes. This piece is a pissy defense of the little lady. Way to make your case.] and more directly, Lloyd Carr and his program. Now, what his motivation was for spouting off with such sophomoric vitriole [Spelling continues to eat shit.] is beyond many, though methinks it has to do with insecurity and some serious jealousy. [As opposed to my motivation -- Outrage on behalf of my wife.] What other reason could there be for going after not only his alma mater [God forbid you should ever criticize your university.], but spreading rumors about fellow Pac-10 school USC and coach Pete Carroll, who absolutely lambasted the comparitively [Spelling vastly shitty.] young coaching whippersnapper (Harbaugh's in his 40's, older than say a Brett Bielema, but never a head coach at this level) for running off at the mouth.

I've met Jim Harbaugh before, at a coaching clinic, and he is a nice guy. Handsome sonofagun, too. If Tom Cruise had been a real-life football player, he'd have been Harbaugh, I imagine. He showed a lot of moxie as a qb at UM and in the league--I was chatting today with former Rams qb Roman Gabriel (who belongs in the HOF, if not for his stats, his many guest appearances on tv shows in the 60's/70's) and it occured [Spelling creating a merdacious firmament which spreads throughout the essay.] to me that Harbaugh and Gabriel's careers mirrored each other, though in different eras: both played 15 years, both threw for nearly 30,000 yards, both went into coaching when their NFL careers ended. In other words, Harbaugh was legit. A gritty player whom Bo Schembechler adored. And perhaps that's what hurts--some of what Harbaugh said was true (as it applies to all schools at this level, not just Michigan) but Harbaugh pointed out Michigan, and it was said to dig, to jab, to prod a program no longer overseen by the emeritus, Bo Schembechler, who passed last November. Harbaugh never would have said what he did had Bo been alive. So, to me it smacks of cowardice. Plus, Harbaugh referenced grad rates from an old media guide without knowing the full scoop, and he was off-base on the crux of his argument. [Wacky sentence. His basic approach, of course, is Guy Writing bigtime -- Got his shoulder around your shoulder, confiding, one good ol' boy to another, in your ear... And that's fine, fine. But then he pops a word like referenced in and you think what a confused person...] As they say in the D, his mouth wrote a check his ass can't cash. [Hadn't heard this one. UD's hardly in a position to complain about vulgarity, but this saying is, er, a bit obscure...]

Now, does every D-I school let in some marginal kids to play ball? Yes. EVERY SCHOOL does, with the exception of the academies, which really cannot compete (see ex-AFA coach Fisher DeBerry's public begging for the admission of more black athletes two years ago) year in, year out, at this level. Michigan graduated 22 of 25 football players last year, a rate you can stack up against any school in the country. Jim didn't mention that though. Instead, he chose to talk about degrees, and now "general studies" was something unseemly. Well, we know that Michigan is an Ivy League-caliber school, right? That is uncontroverted [Again, suddenly uncontroverted... Just weird.] --it takes a 4.0 to get in. So you're saying that one of this prestigious school's majors (a major that dates back a century) is suddenly bogus because of football players? That it was okay for say, James Earl Jones in 1955, but not Chad Henne in 2007? Preposterous. How many of us ever use our specific degree in the occupation which pays us, anyway? The whole topic is absurd. [Absurd, preposterous. We're sputtering. UD's told you about high emotionality and argumentation.]

As a lawyer who has handled a number of defamation/slander/libel cases, I'm careful to say that I have no proof Jim Harbaugh was drunk (I do know the Thunderbird jingle above is lost on some of you young 'uns) when he spouted off about UM and USC. And I won't call him a drunk (as he's been referred to on sports radio and over the net by some), either--hell, we all make mistakes in this life. [Hard to think of a better example of sleazy rhetoric than these sentences.] ...[W]e do know that Harbaugh has been drunk before: 1) He got a DUI in recent months and had to take alcohol classes for those guilty of DUI and 2) he left his wallet in a bar just a few months ago. Now, is THAT the standard Stanford holds itself to? Obviously not. The moral here: don't cast stones when you're in a glass house. Especially when the reason you even have that house is because of a man who is now deceased. Don't spit on Bo Schembechler's grave, Jim Harbaugh; he taught you better. Your father Jack taught you better. Apologize, show contrition, and all will be forgotten; eventually, you'll be accepted back into the fold. But I think Jim may be too stubborn to do so. And that will be his undoing. [Really disgusting. At this point, only Mrs. Acho is nodding.] In the end, I think Harbaugh, who is making enemies among prominent coaches at an alarming rate, is jealous of two programs: USC and Michigan. And he foolishly went after both. A still-irate Carroll and USC will thrash Stanford. Oh, and check out Phil Steele's last two editions and see what Harbaugh's predecessor Buddy Teevens recruited. Buddy Hackett would have done a better job recruiting. He left Stanford bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard [Gawd.], and Harbaugh will likely go bowl-less the next three years, have his contract bought out, and take over Jack's old squad, Western Kentucky. Let's just hope the Hilltoppers don't have too many general studies majors there.'

Labels: SOS

'The dominant image on the front cover of the 2007 Oregon football media guide is coach Mike Bellotti. Same as the back cover, which has a second dominant photo of Bellotti, and the words "Fearless" and "Leadership" and "Intensity" and "Strength" and "Determination" and "Innovative." [The author knows the importance of understatement, of letting language do the work for you. He just lists the words; he just describes the photos. He doesn't comment. He knows we get the idea.]

Except they forgot one word.

Teflon.

When we last left Bellotti, he was muttering under his breath after the Las Vegas Bowl, having been run off The Strip by a herd of stampeding Cougars. His team had just lost its fourth consecutive game and sixth in nine tries. He was telling anyone who would listen that Brigham Young (11-2) wouldn't have finished in the top half of the Pacific-10 Conference, which wasn't exactly an endorsement of his program if he'd stopped to think about it. [Nice pleasant conversational, somewhat confiding, prose.]

So maybe you weren't surprised last month when Bellotti publicly lambasted Dennis Dixon after his projected starting quarterback hit .188 in 24 at-bats in the minor leagues. Bellotti chided Dixon for signing and going to Florida to give baseball a try, effectively sending a Code Red to any future player who dares to miss a summer workout chasing a dream.

Nevermind [Should be two words.] that a few months before, Bellotti was jockeying for the vacant athletic director job. In Eugene, what's good for the coach isn't necessarily good for the quarterback. [Drop necessarily to make this nice observation about hypocrisy even nicer.]

And so this season begins with people wondering if Dixon will find enough confidence to lead. And with the Ducks picked to finish sixth in the conference in the annual media poll despite big-time resources, deep-pocketed boosters, a pro-athletics administration and blue-chip recruits. [Reminds the reader that the university has given over its identity to rich sports boosters.]

But what about high expectations?

Oregon basketball coach Ernie Kent reached the NCAA's elite eight, but because of a history of underachievement found himself with minimal offseason negotiating leverage. Which is only to say that Kent apparently isn't as good at politicking and schmoozing as Bellotti. If Coach Teflon gives a speech at a coaching clinic, it should be titled, "How Cultivating Key Boosters Can Save Your Tail." [Some of this is sort of hokey. In fact, the whole teflon thing is pretty tired. But it's still a fine piece of writing.]

When Mike Riley underachieves at Oregon State, he's held accountable. So is Kent. And so is OSU basketball coach Jay John.

But Bellotti skates [Knows how to play his teflon metaphor.] unlike any other highly compensated employee of the State of Oregon. And he shares in a percentage of season-ticket sales. And he uses a university automobile and a Eugene Country Club membership, among other perks, that are afforded to him as part of his contract. There's something about the free pass that doesn't feel right. [Excellent nasty detail. And the final sentence has a good understated feel to it. Remember: High emotion is the enemy of argumentation.]

Oregon has lost five or more games in four of the past five seasons. Since the 2002 season, Bellotti's teams have zero bowl victories. The Ducks have lost, in order, a Seattle Bowl, a Sun Bowl, a Holiday Bowl and a Las Vegas Bowl. [Ouch.]

Bellotti has passed around the blame for his shortcomings. He's changed offensive coordinators, season to season to season. He's changed starting quarterbacks, series to series. He's changed team captains, game to game. [Repetition of "He's changed" at beginning of each sentence an example of effective repetition. Careful when you try this. The line between effective and deadly is thin. You know who does this really well? Joan Didion. Take a look at almost any page of The Year of Magical Thinking for brilliant use of initial repetition.] What really has to change, though, are the expectations surrounding the head coach, because without it, I suspect Bellotti is going to underachieve, go winless in bowl games over the next decade and shake hands all the way to the university Hall of Fame as if life were a glorified booster luncheon. [Nice simile. Life as glorified booster luncheon is nice.]

Bellotti hasn't performed poorly enough to lose his job, but the cries for appropriate improvement and focus and results are strangely absent at the start of this season. [Drop appropriate. Way blah word.] His inconsistent body of work merits more public scrutiny. His failure to break through given his resources merits a lower threshold of tolerance on a campus where Kent, and other coaches, are held accountable.

For Ducks fans, the football season turns into the stuff of an 18th-century Alexander Pope poem. You know, "Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." [HE'S QUOTING ALEXANDER POPE. HOLD ME BACK.]

But Pope only said it that way because nothing rhymes with Teflon.'

Labels: SOS

Accountability finally came to Durham County District Attorney Michael Nifong last month, when he was disbarred as an attorney and forced to resign as a disgraced public officer. Last week he issued an apology and a full retraction of the rape accusations against three Duke University lacrosse players. [So far so good.]

Now, with students heading to Duke in just a few short weeks [Instead of the sort of dumb cliche just a few short, write the actual number of weeks.] for the beginning of the fall term, the time is at hand to demand some accountability for Nifong's academic enablers. [Already we're in trouble with demand. Angry insistency is not the way to go, especially at the beginning of your essay. Work up to a bit of rage if you must, but don't start in on demands in your second paragraph. The reader responds by assuming that you've got a personal agenda that's making you nuts.]

Eighty-eight members of the Duke faculty publicly promulgated a dreadful letter, enflaming a premature and prejudicial atmosphere against their own students. [You absolutely have to quote a sentence or two from the letter at this point. Or you could link to it. The reader can't be expected to remember it, and you need to demonstrate how dreadful it is. ] Yet, their conduct is largely shielded from accountability. Equally troublesome, their ironically and suddenly protective university masters executed a confidential settlement to further immunize the Duke cabal from civil liability exposure. [Notice how bizarre the combination of constipating adverbs (largely, ironically, suddenly) plus Harry-Potter-speak (cabal, masters) is here. The writer does not have control of his tone.]



The 88 are thus granted a kind of institutional immunity, a corruption of process all by itself because it sidesteps a day of public reckoning.

But although the group can't technically be charged with crimes - though abandoning your young and endangering youth sure do come close to real definable crimes - there are ways these professors can be held accountable. [The writer overstates the magnitude of the offense.] The identities of the 88 professors should be posted in significant ways and places, including in the media and on the Internet, so that they may be known for what they have done.

The likely howls of protest [howls of protest is a cliche] from the tenure police, university guild apologists and free-speech absolutists [Beginning to sputter here. You don't want to sputter.] notwithstanding, the professoriat should not be shielded from appropriate public condemnation for their misconduct. Their dormant consciences and sensibilities should be reawakened to the abhorrent nature of the actions they inflicted on their own students. [Read this sentence aloud. While there's nothing grammatically objectionable about it, it's just weird. Awkward. Stilted. You want your writing - especially opinion piece writing for newspapers - to be as close to conversational speech as possible. No one talks like this.]

But even belatedly squirming consciences are not enough to compensate for the betrayal of fundamental principles involved here. [Ecoute. You don't have to be a poet, okay? You don't. But... belatedly squirming conscience?]

Because the identities of this "Group of 88," as they have been dubbed, are blurred by their group anonymity, they should not be allowed to get away with their prejudgment - a brazen violation of the presumption of innocence, despite later protestations to the contrary. [What we need here is precision about the content of the letter, not sputtering redundancy.]

Their roles as teachers should have included special protection of their pupils from mob hysteria and media hype, not collaboration in the spectacle. These 88 and the rest of the Duke "family" [You guessed it.] stood in loco parentis - in the place of the parents who entrusted their youngsters to Duke's professionals, with substantial tuition payments. The parents' trust was painfully misplaced, and their children suffered irreparable reputation injury and a fundamental breach of duty.

The courses and classrooms of these 88 professors should be emptied. The university's academic leaders should consider assigning them to teach only elective courses. [Someone needs to tell Mr. Bellacosa that university professors pray to teach only elective courses. Only elective courses is not a punishment. It is a reward.] No students should be forced to sit through mandatory courses with professors who evidently believe more in their ideologies than in their human charges.

Next, when students select among their electives, they should shun these professors and their courses - a good, old-fashioned revived remedy of accountability. Shunning is, under these circumstances, a proportionate penalty for the sin of heedlessly injuring young people placed in one's care and charge.

These 88 would thus be professionally disenfranchised, and as they look out at empty rooms and seats, that lesson would be felt and take hold. [ {Cough.} When they're done praying for a straight roster of electives, professors turn to the Give me the Smallest Possible Number of Students in My Class prayer.]

The university's powers that be are unlikely to have the backbone to employ this measure, based on their lack of spine throughout this debacle. But, it's an idea - and aren't universities supposed to be all about openly and courageously exploring ideas?

Duke and especially its 88 should-have-known-better professors were responsible for aiding and abetting Nifong's "crimes" [Second violation.] against his Duke student targets. The DA has had his day of reckoning for what he perpetrated; the 88 should, too. They flunked with a capital "F" the course in Principles of Justice 101, whose first lesson is the presumption of innocence and protection of innocents.

Everyone should be held ultimately accountable for their actions, even the hostile unintended consequences thereof, lest, in the future, hubristic ideologues, invested with power and fiduciary responsibilities, think that they, too, can act irresponsibly, with impunity and immunity. [So there! I mean, thereof! Lest!]

Labels: SOS

'I applaud Hank Brown ("Why I Fired Professor Churchill," Opinion, July 26) for his resolve to restore a semblance of honesty and integrity to an academic world riddled with self-inflated egos who behave as though the First Amendment and archaic tenure policies offer a cloaking device for culpable behavior.

Although I occupy a very small corner of academia, the "self-sought controversy" of faculty members like Ward Churchill and, from my own alma mater, Sami Al-Arian causes a ripple effect across the professoriate. Clearly, the insular, elitist traditions that Mr. Brown challenges have created a breeding ground for such arrogant, antisocial behavior.

I can only hope the firing of Prof. Churchill serves as a wake-up call to accountability and decency to all of us entrusted with the noble responsibility of educating young minds.'

Labels: SOS

Should a human rights center at the nation's most prestigious university be collaborating with the top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the current military surge? [The genius of this opening sentence lies in the word "collaborating." The subject is the military, and the relationship between the military and the university. There's a well-known history, on which the writer is depending, involving CIA/university collaboration, as well as other forms of collaboration. Our other association with the word "collaborating," on which the writer equally depends, is the disgusting history of European collaboration with the Nazis. An excellent opening gambit.]

Led by Gen. David Petraeus, the so-called surge--an escalation of over 25,000 American troops--is resulting in hundreds of killings, mass roundups, door-to-door break-ins, and military offensives in Baghdad, Al-Anbar and Diyala provinces, on the side of a deeply-sectarian Baghdad regime which, according to the White House benchmarks report, still compiles official lists of Sunni Arabs targeted for detention or death. The counter-insurgency campaign is explained as a military way to create "space" for Iraqis to reach a political solution without violent interference. [No problem here, although the writer's already implicitly suggesting collaborative support of this policy on the part of a still-unnamed university.]

The new doctrine was jointly developed with academics at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard. The Carr Center's Sarah Sewell, a former Pentagon official, co-sponsored with Petraeus the official "doctrine revision workshop" that produced the new Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual...

This is not an academic text but, in the Marine Corps' title, a "warfighting doctrine," complete with hundreds of recommendations ranging from how to "clear, hold and build," how to use secret agents in calling in air strikes, even advice on public speaking ("avoid pacing, writing on the blackboard, teetering on the lectern, drinking beverages, or doing any other distracting activity while the interpreter is translating.").

The new counter-insurgency approach purports to be more civilized and humane than conventional kinetic war. It seeks to save the population ("winning hearts and minds") from the insurgents. It attempts to minimize civilian casualties and avoid torture of detainees. It promotes social programs. These no doubt were the attractions of the collaboration for Harvard's "humanitarian hawks." The introduction to the manual is thoughtful and balanced, even raising questions whether the effort can work at all. Sewall tastefully avoids any references to the brutal though targeted suppression necessary for the mission to succeed, but states in Ivy League language why she stands in coalition with the Marines: [The word "tastefully" is terrific. It plays on the sexism of the audience -- women do things tastefully -- and suggests that -- again, just like a woman -- Sewell is able to collaborate with brutality because she's in a Martha Stewart state of denial about what's really going on. This plays beautifully into the history of collaborationist dupes.]

"Humanitarians often avoid wading into the conduct of war for fear of becoming complicit in its purpose. The field manual requires engagement precisely from those who fear that its words will lack meaning..."

She goes on make an ambiguous comment about the dirty war supported by US Special Forces in El Salvador, now known as the "El Salvador option":

"Military annals today tally that effort as a success, but others cannot get past the shame of America's indirect role in fostering death squads."

The only sense in which the fostering of those Salvadoran death squads was "indirect" is that US forces went to great extremes to hide their role as advisers and trainers, the very role be carried out today by US advisers embedded in Baghdad's Interior Ministry, which is dominated by sectarian Shi'a Badr Brigade personnel.

The manual is explicitly based on the traditions of the British in Malaysia and Kenya, the French in Algeria, and the American forces in the "strategic hamlet" and Phoenix operations. Called "gated communities" in Iraq, these population control areas are surrounded by concertina wire and watchtowers as Iraqis are identified, fingerprinted, and eye-scanned in a system of total surveillance and coercion. Outside the concertina wire, Iraqis who the Americans officially call the Kit Carson Scouts are armed for divide-and-conquer missions against other Iraqis in a plan devised by Harvard-trained academic Stephen Biddle, now a Baghdad adviser to Gen. Petraeus. [The writer works the conspiracy angle: Another Harvard person!] Biddle's concept, described in Foreign Affairs, is to manipulate both Shi'as and Sunnis into depending on the US occupation for self-protection. Sewall of the Carr Center writes more generally that the US "strategic challenge is stabilization", meaning the rescue of multiple failed states like Iraq from their own internal insurgencies. The Carr Center hosts a series called "The Long War", in which generals like John Abizaid hold forth on the threat of "Shi'a revolutionary thought" and the looming World War Three.

It's not that counter-insurgency Harvard-style has been effective, as proven by the continued suicide bombings, sniper activity and increasing casualties among US forces since the "surge" began. It is an academic formulation to buttress and justify a permanent engagement in counter-terrorism wars.

But counter-insurgency, being based on deception, shadow warfare and propaganda, runs counter to the historic freedom of university life. [Note what Hayden's saying here. No university professor, or university unit, by his reckoning, could ever be involved in tactical or ethical advice, or thought about, any form of warfare involving deception, since university life is free. It'd take quite some time to clarify the muddiness inside this assertion. The propagandist rightly assumes you don't have the time.] Why then should Harvard collaborate? Is it now a violation of academic freedom to demand there be protocols limiting professors providing support and legitimacy for inherently secretive, classified and deliberately deceptive programs designed ultimately to kill people? [Now the propagandist shows his hand. He's not about university freedom. He wants protocols, baby.]

Perhaps it is the attraction of some intellectuals to the Devil's Game (the phrase originated with Robert Dreyfuss). These are not the "effete intellectuals" so often scorned by the right. These are intellectuals who presumably can "get past the shame" of those death squads, and this time do it right. They believe that the exposure of the generals to a civilian academic atmosphere may humanize the process of war-making, not worrying that the actual danger may be the militarizing of the university. [Yes, actually, they do seem to believe that rather than ignoring the military, academics should pay attention to it in responsible ways. Since Hayden's pretty much defined any form of military activity as demonic, there's no way academics can get involved here. In fact, protocols forbidding involvement must be formulated. Otherwise -- and here's the way scary thing!! -- it's 'the militarizing of the university.']

The Carr Center does not officially favor the war in Iraq [Good of Hayden to point that out. Now for a little character assassination.], though one of its former directors, Michael Ignatieff, is famed for endorsing the US as a "21st century imperium", an "empire lite", and publicly calling for "acceptable degrees of coercive interrogation." On the other hand, there is the formidable Samantha Power, an Irish-born humanitarian who strongly supported the US-NATO Balkans war and campaigned for Gen. Wesley Clark in 2004 [Campaigning for a retired general is proof of collaborationist evil...]. Power is a close adviser to Sen. Barack Obama, who supports a withdrawal of US combat troops by next year with exceptions for "advisers" and special units to battle al-Qaeda. Power, who worked last year in Obama's Washington, DC office, writes that even the proposed combat troop withdrawal can be reversed if Iraq's condition continues to worsen. Intentionally or not, the cautious, complicated Obama proposal as described by Power leaves open the likelihood of thousands of American troops remaining in counter-insurgency roles for years ahead.

If that is the limit of legitimate debate at Harvard [See how good he is? Whoever said 'limit of legitimate debate'? Who's keeping anyone at Harvard from taking up the question of whether advising the military in any capacity is the devil's work? Hayden would have us believe that Harvard's a police state.], the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind [Nice. The Pentagon occupation of the academic mind. It's insidious, evil, and going on all around us. Joe McCarthy, come on down....] may last much longer than its occupation of Iraq, and may require an intellectual insurgency in response.

Labels: SOS

Late September

The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting.

So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.

Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

Labels: SOS

The honorable tradition of college football is tarnished by the University of Oklahoma football team. [Take this out of passive voice for more force in your first sentence: The University of Oklahoma football team tarnishes...] The history and tradition [Don't repeat tradition so soon.] of OU football is richly filled [richly filled is a bit awkward. Just go with filled -- or find a better word.] with National Championships, hall of famers and uncontrollable players [Very nice conclusion of the sentence... sort of unexpected... "uncontrollable players."].

The school’s history of putting criminals on the field is not ending [won't end? continues? Try to avoid the to be verb formulation here.] with Bob Stoops. Barry Switzer’s gang of hooligans is not so different from Stoops’ band of heathens.

They have been involved in controversy after controversy regarding numerous NCAA violations. The most notorious OU coach to be involved with NCAA infractions was Switzer. [Note the short sentences and the reliance, again, on dull to be verbs. Punch it up!]

His history with the school includes winning three national championships, multiple Big Eight Conference championships and producing 54 All-Americans.

Switzer was also accused spying on Darrell Royal’s 1976 University of Texas team and bailing out on OU after the team was placed on probation in 1989.

For six months in 1988, players from Switzer’s team were involved with a shooting, a rape in the athletic dorms, a robbery and arrests for drug dealing.

The Stoops era seems to be steamrolling down an eerily similar path. [eerily seems to clash with steamrolling.] Since being named Oklahoma’s football coach in 1999, Stoops’ team has been involved with numerous scandals. [An awkward word order here makes it look as though the team was named coach.]

The decision to remove quarterback Rhett Bomar and offensive lineman JD Quinn were [should be was] not enough to evade an investigation by the NCAA. The NCAA charged OU with “failure to monitor players” and has forced the team to forfeit the winnings from the 2005-06 season as well as being placed on probation until the 2010 season.

The team has also been involved with a number of secondary violations including providing two banned substances to players, calling recruits multiple times and showing three prospects lockers with their high school number on an OU jersey.

All these violations lead me to believe that OU is showing poor leadership and giving college football a bad name. [Understatement. And poor leadership is a cliche. Speak more directly, with more force, here.] The reputation and tradition of OU has been tarnished and is only getting worse with the increased monitoring of the school by the NCAA. [Repetition of tarnished makes this short piece feel sluggish, as if it isn't going anywhere. Find another word.]

It is the responsibility of the coaching staff to control and supervise the players they recruit. If players could understand that they are being given a great opportunity by receiving many free educational services, I don’t think they would break the rules as often. [Content problem here. Many players don't give a shit about educational services, considering them an impediment.]

It sickens me to see talent like Bomar’s wasted because of greediness and failure to appreciate the rules. [sickens is very good. The piece would have been better altogether if the writer had used variations on the I almost plotzed metaphor throughout.] The NCAA has made these rules to preserve the tradition and reputation of college football. [Drop this sentence.]

Hopefully [hopefully is incorrectly used here] the recent punishments will turn a light on in Stoops’ head [turn a light on is awkward] that OU football is corrupt and needs to be changed.

Labels: SOS

'Abraham Lincoln is credited with this observation: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." [We're starting in a galaxy far away from our subject... But it might work...]

Honest Abe [SOS is getting nervous. Honest Abe... ] succumbed to an assassin's bullet in 1865. The University of Minnesota would have its first graduating class in 1873.

There were two graduates, or roughly the number of scholarship basketball players that wore the cloak and gown during the Dan Monson era.

The above timeline makes it obvious that President Lincoln never met a loyal follower of the Golden Gophers, or to maintain honesty he would have amended the quote to say:

"... You cannot fool all of the people all of the time, unless you're talking about Gophers fans." [Whew. What an exhausting way of getting to a very very simple point.]

Lou Holtz proved without question what saps we can be when his relentless bull-slinging instantly filled the Metrodome. To his credit, Holtz brought with him a strong résumé as a head coach. When the rhetoric stopped for three hours on a Saturday, he was a tremendous offensive coach.

Two decades later, we are being swept off our feet by another slinger in Tim Brewster. What this says is our sap ratio actually has increased in the past two decades, since Brewster brings with him only the verbosity and no track record.

The guy coached for 18 years in Division I-A or the NFL and his bosses resisted the urge to make him a coordinator.

The Gophers fired Glen Mason after the bowl choke against Texas Tech, and Joel Maturi started his search. Once Brewster got the athletic director in a room and started excitedly spewing clichés, our poor bumpkin from the Iron Range didn't have a chance. [This gets better as it goes along, but the writer needs to drop some excess weight: excitedly, poor.]

The spewing hasn't stopped since Brewster was hired in mid-January. He has gone running to every group that will have him, flapping his arms like San Diego's Famous Chicken and screeching, "Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl."

He's also the runaway pitchman in recruiting, where his enthusiasm seems to be convincing all of the prospects some of the time.

Brewster reached a new level in his self-promotion last week when he used a sexual assault investigation to tell us how lucky we should feel to have him.

On Monday, Dominic Jones was charged, and it came with the allegation that his actions were videotaped on Alex Daniels' cell phone. Once Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County attorney, told the tale, it was certain that the university hierarchy was not going to have Jones, Daniels, Keith Massey and E.J. Jones playing football for the Gophers.

The university allowed Brewster to offer the spin that he had reached independently the decision to dismiss the four players from the team.

A statement was released Wednesday in which Brewster said: "We spend a considerable amount of time addressing our players regarding their personal conduct. ... We are establishing a culture of integrity and we will demand that our players are held accountable for their actions."

Two questions:

• Brewster was on the job for three months when the alleged assault of the 18-year-old woman took place. So, why is the coach bragging about addressing his players on personal conduct, if some of them obviously didn't listen?

• If he's forced to establish a culture of integrity, it would seem that he's telling us it was missing when he took over for Mason. So, how was it that Mason dismissed several players for much less serious failings, without feeling the need to pay tribute to himself for doing so?

Yes, this was a high-profile situation that demanded a statement from the coach, but a simple declaration from Brewster that the action had been taken would have left no room for cynicism.

Throw in Maturi's comment -- "I am in full support of the decision of coach Brewster and I appreciate how he has handled this very difficult situation" -- and it all comes off as more of an ain't-Tim-great sales pitch than a sincere reaction to this embarrassment suffered in the athletic department.

You're being manipulated, folks, but as we've learned previously, a football coach with a talent for slinging can fool all of the Gophers fans all of the time.'

Labels: SOS

The only Heisman Trophy winner in Penn State history was never consigned by his coach to spending a Sunday morning crawling across the clammy, sticky concrete of Beaver Stadium, collecting hot dog wrappers and empty Cheese Whiz cups. [In response to a variety of serious offenses on the part of his players, the Penn State coach had them pick trash up at the stadium one day. Let the punishment fit the crime and all... The writer's first sentence, while jammed with all the vivid detail your writing teacher tells you to jam into your sentences, is a bit overwhelming. The coupling of "only" and "never" at the beginning of the sentence is confusing. And the writer's effort to make a trash clean-up sound like years in a gulag looks unpromising.] If Joe Paterno ever punished John Cappelletti and those Nittany Lions of the early 1970s the way he has his current players, putting all of them on trash detail to pay for the alleged offenses of some of them, Cappelletti doesn't remember it. [Note "alleged." Nothing alleged about them. And for "some," write "lots." That's the only way you get to the top of the Fulmer.]

“Then again,” Cappelletti, the 1973 Heisman trophy winner said by telephone the other day, “we may not have had the same problems that he's experienced now.”

The problem was an off-campus brawl in the spring at which at least 15 Penn State football players were present and six were arrested. The university ultimately disciplined 10 players last month, placing four on year-long probation and two on permanent probation and temporarily expelling safety Anthony Scirrotto, defensive lineman Chris Baker, linebacker Jerome Hayes and cornerback Lydell Sargeant.

Those expulsions can end in time for the fall semester and for the four to play in Penn State's season opener against Florida International on Sept. 1 [whew!], but Paterno had beaten the university's judicial affairs system to the punch. He announced his team-wide cleanup detail in May, igniting accusations that he was attempting to subvert the school's investigation. [Coach's punch starts a fire.... Yeah, I know, don't go there... It's sports writing...]

“What Joe does to run the program, what he decides,” Cappelletti said, “is still his call.”

Scheduled to appear at Northampton Country Club in Richboro on July 22 for the Louis P. Merlano Scholarship Classic, Cappelletti, 54, doesn't get back to the East Coast much, maybe three weeks a year. He lives in Laguna Niguel, Calif., now and talks to Paterno only occasionally, but even from that distance, he can see that Paterno's handling of the situation hasn't been all that surprising.

“If coaches don't feel they're getting the most of you, they may have to do something to jump-start you,” Cappelletti said. “It may not be things you want to hear, just like when you're growing up and you hear things from your parents about curfew. But for me to be the best son I could be, my parents had to be tough. And for me to be the best player I could be, Joe had to be tough. If not, what value other than Xs and Os was he bringing to the program?”

It's easy to suggest that, at 80, Paterno is out of touch with today's elite athletes and their parents, that no kid who expects a football coach to smooch his tuchas would choose to play for a crotchety old-timer who might have his entire secondary standing in the center of a 107,282-seat stadium with Hefty bags in their hands. [No comment.] Surely, there are opposing coaches who already have tried to use Paterno's punishment against him in their daily recruiting skirmishes, and maybe that strategy (“You don't want to be picking ... up ... trash ... do you?”) works sometimes. It also sends a terrible message: that at certain programs, an athlete can check his personal accountability at the door. [Penn State - uncompromising in its punishment of misdeeds.]

Remember, too: A university's judicial affairs system is no more bound by due process than a coach's conscience is, and a few recent, high-profile cases have proven that agendas and biases aren't the sole provinces of coaches and big-time boosters.

In 2002, after Penn State's judicial affairs body had expelled defensive back Anwar Phillips for two semesters on accusations of sexual assault, the university's president, Graham Spanier, publicly chastised Paterno for suiting up Phillips in a bowl game, only to look foolish when Phillips was easily acquitted of all charges in Center County court. And if the Duke lacrosse scandal didn't reveal that college administrations and faculties aren't necessarily strongholds of integrity and justice, nothing does.

This doesn't make Paterno infallible — just a man with a measure of integrity, which these days is enough to stand out among the sinners. [John Wayne talk.]

“I'm not sure that there's not a lot of parents who wouldn't see that as a value,” said Cappelletti, a father of four. “If you're not a parent or don't have young adult kids, you may not understand this. At some point, someone taking action like that can be very refreshing. Some parents and athletes going into the process may say, "I'm not going to play for a guy who makes me pick up trash.' But I think the kids realize they did something wrong. [SOS loves it when coaches call the lads kids.]

“It's as much a part of life as it is anything with football. It might be a little embarrassing to a point, but they'll never do something like this again.”

If they do, their punishment will again be Joe Paterno's call. His program, his decision. Always. [Choke. Blubber.]

Labels: SOS

Countless University of Toledo alumni and sports fans, and even the casual everyday observer who relishes dirty laundry being aired, must be wondering just how long Mike O'Brien will be able to hold onto his job as UT's director of athletics. [Background here.] [And, uh, as to style... If you've been following SOS at all, you know we've already got a wordiness problem. Yes, the laundry thing is a cliche, but sports writers only do cliches, and we're about to get a full hamper of them. So forget cliches. Just factor in cliches. Look, instead, at the words jamming things up: both casual and everyday, when one of those two would be better... There are other bad signs: The word "relishes" isn't quite right for the laundry image, and there's his choice of the clunky "to be" word ("being") in place of something smoother...]

Me? I wonder why he'd even want to. [This is good. Strong, simple, and gets its own paragraph. Note that he'll nicely return to this point at the end of the piece.]

His department is being micro-managed by the president's office, which has also been the source of much information that has found its way into media reports lately. [Is... has... has... Again with the dull "to be" words. And don't forget content, as the writer's argument revs up: He's trying to defend a very corrupt athletic department -- a difficult thing to do even with excellent writing ability -- by complaining that it's really an okay place, just suffering from micro-management... He fails to point out that it wasn't managed at all for so long a time that it became impossibly corrupt: The new oversight is a direct result of the department's own fuckupery.] UT's relatively new president believes that public business should be conducted in public. That's fine. But it is one thing to conduct public business and it's another to let a major department head publicly twist in the breeze.

O'Brien isn't perfect. There's enough smoke coming out of UT to indicate there might be a fire or two at least smoldering. [Sure, sure, the cliches ... the bizarrely mixed figurative language... But I'm telling you that this is how all sports writers write... ] Maybe he hasn't paid enough attention to every paperclip and every penny. [Cry me a paperclip. We're talking bigtime corruption here. This is where Flyover Guy-Writing most clearly expresses itself. The guy's a booster. Probably buddies with many of the principals, etc.] Maybe coaches and administrators have overstepped vague bounds when it comes to travel and expenses. [Why are they vague?] Maybe having revenue from an away basketball game sent directly to a third-party sporting goods company was a bad idea. (Actually, there's no maybe about that one.) [A tragic schizoid thing begins to emerge here, in which the guy both acknowledges obvious malfeasance and complains about people who point it out...] Maybe the athletic deficit is too large, although I'd defy you to find many, if any, [many, if any, is pretty weird] mid-major universities playing Division I-A football that are operating at a profit. [Hey, that's right... To all the other stuff we can say about programs like Toledo's, we can add money-loser.] Maybe some of the staffers at Savage Hall should not be enrolled in the free and reduced lunch program.

And, of course, there's the smoking e-mail. In the aftermath of the merger of UT and the Medical University of Ohio, which took place just over a year ago, an assistant athletic director whose job was to oversee business affairs and monitor finances was dismissed, ostensibly because her position was absorbed by the merger. It was hard to buy from the start. If the alumni director at one school or the other was let go it would make sense. [A bit obnoxious, I know - just reminding you about the WAS problem...] Or a public information officer. Or a campus police chief. Or a president. One merged school, one merged job. But MUO, to my knowledge, had no athletic department. So in what way did the merger render this woman's job unnecessary? It didn't add up.

O'Brien, who is a smart man, then did a very, very stupid thing and it might ultimately cost him his job. [The wordiness thing again. Drop who is. Drop then. Drop very - you don't need either one of them. Like a lot of intensifiers, these actually dilute. Drop ultimately.] Knowing that this woman, by now a very disgruntled ex-employee who was never popular among the Savage Hall set - in part, perhaps, because she was counting every paperclip and penny - was talking to The Blade, O'Brien sent an e-mail to a Blade executive attempting to discredit her and her story. It said, in part, that "I had to eliminate her role as she was a tremendous blow to our morale, among other things." [I'll go through this quickly, since you're getting the idea: Drop by now; drop very; drop who was; instead of she was counting, write she counted.]

The former assistant AD is expected [write will probably to avoid yet another to be word] to file a lawsuit challenging her termination and that e-mail could end up being very expensive [drop very -- and if you want to get rid of the "being very expensive," rewrite the phrase: that email might really cost the university -- something like that.] for UT. O'Brien must have been temporarily brain dead to have clicked the "send" button.

So, all is not well at UT and with O'Brien. And, you may note, we haven't even mentioned the alleged gambling scandal, once a sizzling topic, which now is simmering on the back burner as the FBI presumably goes about its business. That will likely be another story for another day.

Oddly enough, considering all of the above, I'll go on record as saying Mike O'Brien is a heck of an athletic director [Here's where the tragic schizoid guy thing comes in. Having written a spectacular indictment of the place, he will now swear undying love.], at least in regards to the things UT fans really care about - wins and losses, championships, academics (and it might be a stretch to say college sports fans anywhere really care about that), scheduling, game contracts, and facilities. [Off the rails here. So the writer cares only about the shit the fans care about? And what's that thing about academics? Bizarre.]

In fact, had he done nothing else since being hired in January of 2002, O'Brien should be inducted in the Varsity T Hall of Fame for negotiating one contract for one football game. On Sept. 19, 2009, the Rockets will play Ohio State in Cleveland Browns Stadium. Toledo will be the home team, which is an unprecedented coup, and will pocket the proceeds from an allotment of 58,000-plus tickets. The game is an automatic sellout and UT's net proceeds after expenses should top $2.5 million. And that may be conservative. To our knowledge, only one athletic director of one mid-major college football program has ever signed his name to such a contract. The day the tickets go on sale will be the day Toledo's athletic deficit all but disappears.

UT also will realize a $500,000 payday for a recently-announced football game at Michigan during the 2008 season. Over the next four seasons, the Rockets will play home football games against Purdue, Iowa State, Fresno State, Boise State and Arizona, among others.

O'Brien played the lead role in orchestrating a $5 million gift from UT graduate Chuck Sullivan and his wife that jump-started the Savage Hall renovation project. An indoor practice facility for football is also in the advanced planning stages. Needed renovations to several minor sports venues have also been accomplished under O'Brien's watch. And, for seven straight semesters, at least half of UT's athletes have compiled 3.0 grade-point averages or higher. [Well, this is all fine, and I'm sure it means that Toledo's program will soon be one of the few in the country to be profitable, as well as an academic role model.]

Prior to the smoking e-mail, Lloyd Jacobs, the university's president, said publicly that he wanted to retain O'Brien and extend the AD's contract beyond its June, 2008 end date. But he then appointed a committee to examine O'Brien's performance and make a recommendation regarding any extension. Strange. [Not strange. Someone who understands the term "tipping point" finally got to the university's president.]

Jacobs has announced a restructuring that moves all athletic compliance and financial accounting under the central administration. He removed from the post of faculty athletics representative a respected law professor with 17 years in the position. He suggested in a letter to O'Brien that laws may have been violated in the control of medications and that the AD should consider replacing the head team physician, a contract employee for 18 years with impeccable, nationally-recognized credentials in sports medicine, with an employee of the university's Health Science Campus. He requested an inquiry by the Ohio Board of Pharmacy, which subsequently found no critical problems and no laws broken.

Jacobs also declared that all returning football and men's basketball players would be subject to an interview with a special counsel appointed by the state attorney general's office before their eligibility was certified for the upcoming school year. He put a spin on it but, frankly, it sounds every bit like forced participation in an internal investigation into the alleged gambling scandal.

So, to sum up, the UT athletic director has the main campus finance and compliance offices, internal investigators, a contract committee, a special counsel, the Health Science Campus, a new faculty rep, an inquisitive media, possibly the FBI, and most definitely a president who seems intent on reinventing the athletic wheel looking over his shoulder.

Mike O'Brien may or may not be able to keep his job.

Frankly, I can't imagine why he'd want it.

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Holmberg provided misinformation to your readers by not accurately quoting me and, in several instances, by misquoting me regarding my supposed subjects--from conversations that were strictly off the record. One individual erroneously mentioned by name in the troubling piece later contacted me by phone. "This article has ruined my family!" he said. I never identified any individual when speaking to Holmberg, neither confirming nor denying his speculative assumptions. I certainly did not quote any source by name at any time. Holmberg's actions have cast The Nation in a dreadful light.

... I'm sympathetic with his concerns, but I don't consider it journalistically responsible to indefinitely withhold possibly important information about a historically significant case. And as a practical matter, it's not possible in a competitive journalistic environment.... As for compromising or jeopardizing his sources, that's a risk journalists take every day when they decide to publish a story. It can't be used as a permanent excuse for sitting on information that's vital to the public, and in this case to the possible administration of justice and to history itself.

We know, aphoristically, about sticks and stones breaking our bones and words being comparatively harmless. But those of us who work with words professionally may be especially susceptible to etymological wounds. [Already a bit strange. Etymology refers to the study of the history of words. UD's been wounded by words, sure, but never by the study of the history of words.] I have been a working journalist and a part-time professor, both of which harbor a verbal vulnerability factor — or should I call it a linguistic punishment index?

During four decades or so in the journalistic trenches [cliche], I tried to develop a resilience to tough critiques by editors, reporters, readers; that seemed de rigueur to protect one’s sanity. Then I started teaching journalism, as an adjunct professor at New York University for four years and at Drew University in Madison, N.J., for one year. And much to my chagrin, I realized again just how hurtful words can be. As the focus of student evaluations, I suddenly became the reader, not the writer, and I started to react as other readers might when they think they have been wounded in print. [The writer wants us to believe that the notorious rough language of adults in newspaper and magazine offices is less wounding than student evaluation form language. UD finds this really unpersuasive.]

An established tool of student empowerment in American higher education, student evaluations are a staple in all classes at the end of each semester. A journalist-professor friend who is less than enamored of teaching caustically refers to them as “customer service.” Translation: He has been burned by his students. But his larger meaning is that higher education, like American society in general, is increasingly market-driven, and by his jaded reckoning a student and his parents are not markedly different from Harry the Striving Suburbanite roaming the aisles of Home Depot. [This is a guy who wants to write caustic American satire. His horrible writing only manages a sneer.]

Student response to the product must be quantified — a college education is a product for which someone is paying upward of $40,000 a year. Just as television executives cannot assume that people are watching their channels and approving of what they put on the air, the powers-that-be in higher education cannot afford to be less than responsive to the reactions of their fussy postadolescent clientele. [I haven't marked all the cliches this writer has already used, but I trust you've noted them. The writer's effort to reduce the whole business of course evaluation to profit-driven baby-sitting has failed, but he is certainly succeeding in drawing a personal character sketch.]

So you have course evaluations. First, there are the forms. Students fill in blanks to rate the correctness of several statements about their classroom experiences. Here are three typical statements from a Drew University evaluation form: “Sequence of course material was logical and systematically organized.” “Instructor was clear and understandable in giving explanations.” “Instructor seemed open to and interested in the concerns of students.”

Then students are encouraged to add written comments — anonymously, as with the forms. Take your best shot, or give credit where credit is due: those are the implied options. In my pedagogical innocence, I failed to realize at first how much impact evaluations could have, especially those scrawled comments that ranged from harsh indictments (“Professor Holmberg is the worst professor I’ve had at N.Y.U.”) to high praise (“Professor Holmberg is a great editor.”) [How much impact they could have on him, that is. Most professors, receiving empty generalities like these about how great or horrendous they are, dismiss them.]

The “worst professor” comment came, I am virtually certain, from a schmoozing student who curried favor with me throughout the semester. But during our one-on-one semester’s-end interview that I had with all my students, he said sarcastically about this presumably helpful ritual: “Are you trying to be a talk-show host, or what?” [Put aside the image of this man squirreling about in search of the identities of students who hurt his self-esteem. This is Scathing Online Schoolmarm, not Scathing Online Freudian. Note only his deadly overuse of adverbs: virtually, sarcastically, presumably...]

Only in retrospect did I recognize the underlying hostility of this silly remark. (As always, incidentally, I determined this unnamed student’s probable identity by carefully and compulsively analyzing the few facts the students gave about themselves on the forms — the grades they expected in the class, for instance. It was a pathetic sight, no doubt: the old, aggrieved journalist-professor poring over the slings and arrows from youth in bloom who had penetrated his sheltered universe.) [Again, ain't this weird? What sort of journalist gives a shit about what pishers say? And maybe the writer means these excruciating cliches -- youth in bloom, slings and arrows -- to be ironic, but it's just not coming off.]

The bottom-line appraisal of me at N.Y.U. by a supervising faculty member: I was a “fair to good” teacher. That was probably an equitable assessment, and as far as I could determine, it was based largely on the senior faculty’s evaluation of evaluations. At N.Y.U. and Drew, I was not subjected to classroom visits and critiques by full-time faculty members. So it doesn’t appear to be an exaggeration to say that in higher education the students often make the call on the caliber of their teachers. [A confused paragraph. If the appraisal was fair, why does he go on to say that it wasn't fair, since it was based not on adult visits to his classrooms, but exclusively on student evaluation?]

Sad to say, because Drew is such an exemplary school that in one of my three classes there I experienced the worst psychic injury in my university stint — from words I thought were severely lacking in intellectual openness and self-knowledge. I began the semester with what I hoped was an illuminating discussion of the digital revolution and its impact on print journalism. And throughout the term, as I had done routinely at N.Y.U., I used The Times as an educational tool. I tried very hard to convey the value and enormously important traditions of print, of quality journalism. [See how all of his intensifiers and qualifiers and cliches not only muck up his prose, but somehow evoke for us a man whose pomposity and offended sense of personal greatness create self-involved, petulant forms of expression?]

But in their evaluations, 4 out of 11 students ignored my efforts [Well, you've told us you tried "very hard," but we're not compelled to believe you. Maybe you didn't. Maybe those four students were right. Your writing hasn't been able to make us like and trust you enough to put us securely on your side in the case.] and attacked my journalistic and professorial credibility in what was for me an unprecedented fashion. They said I showed a “liberal bias” by using The Times in class (perhaps echoing the political bent of their parents, as the young are wont to do) [Or perhaps his students noted what Holmberg himself does not note in his bio for this piece -- his most high-profile writing has been for The Nation...], and two students said — glibly and absurdly in my view — that the class was of no benefit because of my perceived bias. One said bluntly, “I learned nothing from this class.” Another — very likely a medical student with whom I worked more than the rest because she was outside her field — said that “I did not learn anything in this class besides a strong dislike of The N.Y. Times. There was no journalistic background taught.”

That last remark was so stunningly and obviously wrongheaded [Pause a moment with me to collect our last batch of mad-as-hell adverbs: glibly, absurdly, bluntly, stunningly, obviously... See what I mean about how prose can do you in? The guy's sputtering with outraged self-love.] that I nearly tore up the evaluation sheet. An overreaction to be avoided, of course. My always-supportive English department chairman calmed me down, and with the acuity of a true educator put student evaluations in perspective. She explained that there was an ambivalence about New York implicit in the suburban students’ comments, in addition to the political component. I thanked her for her wise counsel and began bracing myself for another set of evaluations: this summer I’ll be teaching a course in introductory journalism at Drew.

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I once asked a friend of mine, a novelist, why so many writers have drinking problems. "A better question is why so many drinkers have writing problems," he replied. [This is amusing, but what's the connection between the sally and the point coming up about there being a lot of law bloggers?]

His response came to mind recently when I began to toy with the idea of starting a blog. Although the contrarian in me is attracted to the prospect of being the last law professor in America without one, the forms' advantages are obvious. [The writer is correct that, among academics, law professors are particularly drawn to the blog form, with Ann Althouse among the most prominent.]

A blog allows one to dash off a brilliant riposte to some flawed argument or rhetorical atrocity, without having to deal with publishing schedules or, worse, editors who insist that factual assertions be true, and who place other tiresome demands on creative genius. [The sarcasm ain't working. It's failing partly for stylistic reasons -- the guy's not a good enough writer to pull off humor -- and partly because it's unfair. It doesn't
describe what legal bloggers do or how they think of themselves at all.]

These same features also represent the disadvantages of a blog. Every time I hear the Blog Siren singing its Celine Dionesque song [Have no idea what this means.], I end up thinking of a certain type of legal academic blogger — the sort who has a habit of concocting (intentionally?) preposterous posts, which then elicit a predictable stream of insults from various precincts of the blogosphere. [The guy absolutely has to name a few of these, with links. I can't think of any, and I read lots of legal blogs.]

Our brave blogger then sallies forth in a state of high dudgeon, demanding apologies from those who have insulted her, while at the same time exacerbating the situation by engaging in the most incredibly juvenile banter. [Constipated writing. Again, not funny. UD can help this guy out with his problem: He should not start a blog.] I find it difficult to believe such witticisms aren't composed with one hand, while the other holds a glass of cabernet sauvignon the size of Lake Tahoe.

Among writers in general, and bloggers in particular, alcohol and narcissism go together like peanut butter and chocolate. [Does the writer mean this to mean that they do go together? What the fuck?] Psychologists define narcissistic personality disorder as involving a grandiose sense of self-importance, and an overwhelming need for the constant attention and admiration.

What better example of this can there be than bloggers obsessed with how many "hits" their posts are eliciting, or how often they're mentioned on the Internet, and who take pride in drawing attention to themselves by being aggressively obnoxious? [Once again, if the writer's unwilling to name any legal blogger who does this, he's easily dismissed as a jerk.]

Blogs pose special dangers for academics. The whole point of academic life is to offer those who live it the time to spend months and years becoming expert about, and reflecting upon, complex issues, before committing thoughts on such matters to print.

The same can't be said for the chardonnay-fueled rant posted at 3 in the morning, which may inadvertently tell your readers far more than they wish to know about your living-room decor, your psycho-sexual neuroses and your views on "American Idol." [Lame and lamer. Get ready for two bizarre final paragraphs.]

None of which is to deny many bloggers, including academic bloggers, do excellent work. Just a few of the lawyers and law professors who regularly write first-rate things in the genre include Glenn Greenwald, Jack Balkin, Eugene Volokh and Sandy Levinson. [If you want to be taken as a powerful satirist, with those chardonnay references and all, you can't restrict yourself, like some little missy at a teaparty, to naming law bloggers you like. You've got to name the ones you're attacking... Notice, by the way, that the guy gives a female pronoun to the sort of blog he hates, and then lists among the blogs he likes only those written by men. Biggies like Ann Althouse clearly have this guy's knickers in a twist. Who cares.]

I could list many more. These writers represent a variety of perspectives, but they all write fluent, accessible prose, they mostly avoid shooting from the hip and their analyses of various topics are, if I may say, generally quite sober. [End of essay. No particular reason why it's the end of the essay, but then this piece of writing is incoherent from the get-go. UD's advice: Consult a psychologist.]

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A Fairway View, But the Window is Often Broken

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In the course of its investigation [of schools throughout the Maricopa County Community College District], the Tribune interviewed dozens of past and current athletes and coaches. A reporter attempted to attend numerous [academic-credit] coaching classes but found only one meeting at its scheduled time and place. ... Typically, [when reporters went to the locations of classes at the scheduled times,] the classrooms were empty, the lights off. [These are best understood as courses in ontology: What is "being"? What would a "non-being" class look like?] The newspaper also reviewed course outlines and other material from coaching classes offered this school year.

During the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years, MCCCD data shows almost 1,000 athletes enrolled in 64 coaching classes at the Mesa, Scottsdale, South Mountain and Glendale colleges. Thirty of those classes contained only players.

Athletes made up 75 percent of all students who took coaching classes, the data shows.

“A lot of them aren’t going to be coaches, but they’re taking it because they enjoy that class,” said Amy Goff, head of SCC’s physical education department. [Fine Italian Sleaze: The kids are okay!]

They also get good grades.

Ninety-nine percent of the athletes who completed coaching classes got passing grades. That means 951 students passed and only four failed, the data shows.

In all health and P.E. classes, only 88 percent of the athletes passed.

Maria Harper-Marinick, the district’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, said there is nothing wrong with a coach running a class as a team practice so long as the required material is covered. The required material for the coaching classes is generic she noted, saying mainly that students must learn how to produce a “motivated team.” [Fine Italian Sleaze: There's no real 'material' here, see -- This is a college course in... er... whatever you do to produce a motivated team...] The district refused a Tribune records request for copies of written exams from coaching classes held last school year. Pete Kushibab, MCCCD’s general counsel, said the release of past tests would undermine the integrity of future coaching classes. [Really Fine Italian Sleaze: Academic integrity is what it's all about! If you so much a lay a finger on a previous test, and then you publish even one challenging question from it, our students might read it in your paper and fail to learn the material...]

If a coach chooses to teach using the same on-field techniques for class as he would for practice, “that is considered teaching methodology,” Harper-Marinick said. “In our system, it’s up to the instructor to decide for that period of time, that was the best use of time to convey information, to elicit learning.” [Fine Italian Sleaze + excellent use of pedagogical buzzwords -- It's all about the unstinting effort to elicit learning... Calling weekly ball practice a college course is part of the freedom to implement your own teaching methodology...]

... College officials insist that athletic directors are not creating classes simply to keep their players eligible.

“Let me make it very clear. Exercise science is an academic program,” said Ann Stine, chairwoman of MCC’s exercise science department. “Athletics is student services. They’re separate. Not the same.” [This bit isn't sleaze so much as, to vary Keats a little, the Vehemence is Truth, Truth Vehemence technique, in which saying something really really forcefully -- I'm gonna make this really clear -- somehow equals that thing being true.]

... [One coach/professor] balked when asked about the academic value of teaching his players these subjects. “Now you’re questioning my academic freedom,” Giovando said. [Very very fine Italian sleaze. It's called academic freedom, fucker!]

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SOS Stays on the
Quotation Marks
Warpath

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Rip it up and throw it away. [Glance down to the end of her opinion piece. She returns to the rip it up bit. This circular approach to structure is almost always a good bet.] That’s the advice I’m giving my fellow college and university presidents this month as the “reputation survey” from U.S. News & World Report lands on our desks. [You guessed it. I'd take "reputation survey" out of quotation marks.] I am one of 12 presidents who wrote a letter urging colleagues to take a stand for greater integrity in college rankings — starting by boycotting the magazine’s equivalent of the “American Idol” voting process. [Everyone in the country except for tv-less UD knows what American Idol is -- again, no need for quotation marks.]

All presidents receive versions of the reputation survey organized by region. Mine lists 181 Northern universities, including schools as different as the behemoth City University of New York’s Hunter College, with more than 20,000 students, and my Trinity, a historically Catholic women’s college that’s now a 1,600-student university.

The survey asks me to “rate the academic quality of undergraduate programs,” assigning each school a single score using a 1-to-5 scale from “marginal” to “distinguished.” [Quotation marks here are fine, since this is direct quotation.] That I have little real information about these 181 institutions does not seem to matter to the U.S. News editors. The tabulated survey results will account for 25 percent of the total score they use to rank colleges and universities in the “Best Colleges” issue.

Survey concerns

In a cover letter reminiscent of a sweepstakes mailing, U.S. News informs me that I am “one of a select group of people” with “the broad experience and expertise needed to assess the academic quality of your peer institutions.” Most of what I know about these schools is through anecdotes, news stories and rumors. Should I score an institution poorly because I’ve heard that it has money woes? Should faculty unrest influence my vote?

This reputation survey is just part of the larger problem with “Best Colleges,” a misnomer that feeds into the American obsession with celebrity, prestige and list making. [A misnomer that feeds sounds awkward to me. One of those two words should be changed.] What’s “best” educationally for an aspiring physicist is quite different from what’s “best” for a future reading teacher. [Liberate "best" from the rabbit ears.] But in the strange alchemy of U.S. News, the rich diversity of American higher education boils down to a few points about fame and wealth. [I love "strange alchemy," but would change "diversity" to "brew" in order to keep the boiling alchemic metaphor going.]

Crunching the numbers

In addition to the reputation survey, U.S. News collects lots of institutional data that it churns through its own formulas to score each school; those scores drive the rankings. Colleges that have high faculty salaries and strong “selectivity” — meaning that they reject a lot of applicants — fare much better than those that are more efficient with resources or that accept more students. [Liberate "selectivity."]

Universities that want to move up in the rankings dare not admit more low-income students from urban public schools who might lower the retention and completion rates.

U.S. News also provides an incentive for colleges to raise tuition because that means higher “educational expenditures per student” and more “faculty resources,” which together account for 30 percent of the score. The very consumers whom U.S. News allegedly serves are paying a hefty price for what its rankings have done to higher education. [Drop "allegedly."]

Privately, some presidential colleagues have said they agree with my position but are afraid to act publicly for fear of upsetting trustees or alumni. But one of the essential tasks of leadership is to risk speaking the hard truth.

U.S. News and others in the college-ranking business claim that they promote accountability in higher education. But what truly betrays public trust is permitting surrogate measures of academic quality to replace real information about what students learn on our campuses. Colleges need to take back the responsibility for communicating educational results, starting with posting accreditation reports on Web sites.

We also need to teach prospective students and families to assess what really counts in higher education — not a magazine ranking but how well a college meets a student’s learning style and academic interests, how available the faculty are outside the classroom, whether students can get the courses they need to graduate in a timely way and what professional schools and employers welcome its graduates. [Note that McGuire's style is elegantly simple and straightforward.] The best way to assess a school’s quality is to visit the campus, stay overnight in residence halls with other students, meet the faculty, sit in on classes and try on the “feel” of the place. [Liberate "feel."]

PR campaigns

Some of the actual best colleges in this nation do not fare well in the U.S. News survey because they do not have the wealth, big-time sports notoriety or public relations clout to influence the peer voting system.

Every March and April, in anticipation of the reputation survey, some university PR machines go into overdrive and crowd my desk with glossy brochures touting their accomplishments. A few presidents go so far as to appeal for my vote directly, sending personalized form letters extolling the virtues of their colleges. I rip those up and throw them away, where they commingle in the trash can with the U.S. News survey. ["Commingle" is an odd choice -- a little too poetic for this trashy conclusion... But that odd, high/low tonal mix somehow works. Not sure why. Maybe because it's kind of funny.]

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COWARDS KICK AWAY
ANOTHER PIECE OF
AMERICA'S SOUL

[We've already got a problem. Souls aren't strewn along the ground like rocks to be kicked away. It's an odd metaphor, and it doesn't work.]

By KINKY FRIEDMAN

April 15, 2007 --

I MET Imus on the gangplank of Noah's Ark. [Confiding, cool, this is writing that assumes a lot -- No need to give a first name -- you know who I mean, and the two of us have that special cool intimacy which has us calling each other by our last names... Friedman's attempt to find a clever way of saying he's known Imus forever doesn't work -- the Noah's Ark thing is hokey.] He was then and remains today a truth-seeking missile with the best bull-meter in the business. ["Truth-seeking missile" is clunky, somehow cliched, not funny. "Bull-meter" wants to do something innovative with the cliche bullshit meter, but, again, it doesn't come off. A large part of Friedman's problem in this essay is precisely this spew of metaphors. No metaphor's going to work if it's lost in a hundred other metaphors. What's created is just a mess, and readers read verbal messes as out of control emotionality. Friedman can't defend Imus and get us on his side if his essay is merely an airing of Friedman's personal feelings. So far he hasn't even tried to reach out to us; he has merely displayed his sense of his own brave cool.]

Far from being a bully, he was a spiritual chop-buster never afraid to go after the big guys with nothing but the slingshot of ragged integrity. [UD's heart breaks at this horrible writing. So Imus was a David against ... exactly which Goliaths? Judging by press coverage, Imus was a Goliath. Slingshots aren't ragged, and Imus isn't ragged. None of the images seem to have anything to do with reality.] I watched him over the years as he struggled with his demons and conquered them. [But he didn't conquer them. Not all of them. That's why he's roasting in hell at the moment.] This was not surprising to me.

Imus came from the Great Southwest, where the men are men and the emus are nervous. And he did it all with something that seems, indeed, to be a rather scarce commodity these days. A sense of humor. [I have no trouble with the Dadaist absurdity of the emu thing. That's fine. But to try that hard to be an original writer, and then to come right back with a cliche -- scarce commodity -- is to communicate a sort of schizy confusion, which serves you not at all when you're trying to write a persuasive piece.]

There's no excusing Imus' recent ridiculous remark, but there's something not kosher in America when one guy gets a Grammy and one gets fired for the same line.

The Matt Lauers and Al Rokers of this world live by the cue-card and die by the cue-card [live and die is a cliche; so is of this world]; Imus is a rare bird, indeed - he works without a net. [A bird that works without a net? Don't all birds work without a net? Our sense that this piece was dashed off in a self-righteous rage is deepening.] When you work without a net as long as Imus has, sometimes you make mistakes.

Wavy Gravy says he salutes mistakes. They're what makes us human, he claims. And humanity beyond doubt, is what appears to be missing from this equation. If we've lost the ability to laugh at ourselves, to laugh at each other, to laugh together, then the PC world has succeeded in diminishing us all.

Political correctness, a term first used by Joseph Stalin, has trivialized, sanitized and homogenized America, transforming us into a nation of chain establishments and chain people. [Just wild gesticulation here, with bizarre generalizations and massive logical gaps.]

Take heart, Imus. You're merely joining a long and legendary laundry list of individuals who were summarily sacrificed in the name of society's sanctimonious soul: Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Joan of Arc, Mozart and Mark Twain, who was decried as a racist until the day he died for using the N-word rather prolifically in "Huckleberry Finn." [Losing touch with reality...]

Speaking of which, there will always be plenty of Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons around. There will be plenty of cowardly executives, plenty of fair-weather friends, and plenty of Jehovah's Bystanders, people who believe in God but just don't want to get involved. In this crowd, it could be argued that we need a Don Imus just to wake us up once in a while. [Sputtering.]

There probably isn't a single one of Imus' vocal critics who come anywhere close to matching his record of philanthropy or good acts on this earth. [Irrelevant.]

Judge a man by the size of his enemies, my father used to say. A man who, year after year, has raised countless millions of dollars and has fought hand-to-hand to combat against childhood cancer, autism, and SIDS - well, you've got a rodeo clown who not only rescues the cowboy, but saves the children as well. [Did he say sanctimonious somewhere up there?]

I believe New York will miss its crazy cowboy and America will miss the voice of a free-thinking independent-minded, rugged individualist. [Cliche.] I believe MSNBC will lose many viewers and CBS radio many listeners. [After all that hot language, he gives us this sentence.]

Too bad for them. That's what happens when you get rid of the only guy you've got who knows how to ride, shoot straight and tell the truth. [Ronald Reagan School of Writing.]

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'The current price for a new University of Oregon basketball arena is $213.5 million, a significant increase over the recent estimate of $160 million. [Starts with numbers, and dramatic ones at that. As with the Univesity of Minnesota, everyone knows these university stadium projects will almost certainly be obscenely over budget.] Hasn't the time come for soul searching by those who are so avidly promoting this project? [See, this isn't the most stylish writing -- The rhetorical question's a little clunky, and prescribing soul searching for the soulless tends to make the whole effort feel futile just as the essay begins...] The enormous challenge of raising these many millions is taking a heavy toll on the university's good name. [Too many adjectives: enormous, many, heavy, good... You only want a couple of these. If you overdo it, the paradoxical result is a weakening of impact.]

The architects dubbed their design a "theater of basketball," but the arena's scale and amenities bring to mind a palace. [Pretty good. Ends with his strongest word: palace... Yet one can imagine a spiffier writer making something amusingly satirical out of this observation.] Is it not possible to erect a basic arena just large enough to provide the revenue necessary for making Duck athletics "self-sustaining"? [Why quotation marks around self-sustaining?]

Allan Price, vice president for advancement, states that the UO doesn't have to make excuses for wanting to erect the best possible facility, and that the institution carries this "philosophy" to all its projects. [Don't overuse the word 'erect.' Reason obvious. And again, no need for those quotation marks around philosophy.] Yet a few years ago, a properly equipped auditorium was cut early from designs for the UO art museum's renovation. [Excellent. Shows up their hypocrisy with a strong example.]

The first casualty of the arena initiative was longtime Athletic Director Bill Moos. The reasons behind his resignation probably lie in a report presented orally to the UO President Dave Frohnmayer. A written report, belatedly released at The Register-Guard's insistence, is uninformative and incompletely researched. Moos' removal thus served only to undermine faculty confidence in the administration.

Pat Kilkenny's appointment as athletic director may well be the right one, but the result of the job search may have been preordained. [Confusing formulation here.] Many indications support the perception [Translate this into English: A lot of people think.] that the hire was driven by only one agenda - to build the arena. The position description is unusual: It doesn't list even the most standard academic qualifications for the job, although the person hired is expected to "function as a senior official of the university."

The administration has defended Kilkenny's lack of a university degree by citing the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan and Purdue University as places where "boosters" have been hired as athletic directors. [Take booster out of quotation marks.] The comparison is spurious. [Good. Spurious is a nasty little word, and when used properly has quite a bite.] All three have college degrees and cannot be characterized as "boosters" in the vein of Kilkenny. Prior to becoming athletic directors, Barry Alvarez was Wisconsin's head football coach and Michigan's Bill Martin was a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee and taught courses at Michigan.

The pressure to raise funds for the arena has caused the UO to issue other problematic statements. Frohnmayer and others have argued that since the arena and Moos' buyout are donor-financed, academics are unaffected by the cost of these ventures.

This is fanciful. [Again, good. Simple, declarative, ending with a strong word.] A portion of the proceeds of the sale of Westmoreland student housing is being diverted to purchase property that may eventually play some role in the arena project. That even a penny of this money could go for athletics is hurtful to the UO's academic mission, which for years has struggled with frightfully strained conditions: For lack of space, music students have had to practice in bathrooms. Departments have had to convert not only bathrooms but also storage closets into faculty offices. [Frightfully strained is the wrong tone -- a little too Anglo teaparty. The writer should have found one powerhouse word for those two. And the bathroom thing is incredibly strong ammunition for his case: He should have begun the essay with it. His very first line should have been about music students practicing in bathrooms. And he should have ended his essay by returning to those students.]

The earmarking of Westmoreland money for possible use on the arena makes everyone stakeholders in the project. This arena venture should not, therefore, be allowed to stay in the hands of two or three UO administrators and a couple of donors.

Truth is a casualty of the pressure to keep big-time sports on track. [The writer doesn't need this sentence. The following sentence is much stronger all by itself at the beginning of this paragraph.] Frohnmayer wrote in The Register-Guard this year, "We take great pride in such measures of our academic success as the graduation rates of our student-athletes. Those rates have risen steadily in recent years. ..."

What kind of snow job is this? [Good use of the rhetorical question here.] The NCAA's findings indicate that the graduation rate of UO athletes has fallen from 79 percent to 47 percent in five years. Obvious strategies for boosting academic performance, such as making sure all students attend classes and have time to focus on exams, are routinely ignored. This year we saw an increase in the number of football games, and we have again scheduled a Civil War game during final exams - despite a University Senate resolution against this practice. The culprit is, of course, the vast sums required to finance UO's sports machine. [It's clear from his guy-style style that this guy is far from a hothead. He's deliberative. Professorial. So as he ups the rhetoric and reveals real anger it's quite effective... as in, things must really be scandalous if people like this guy are so upset.]

Those who believe a massive, commercialized sports enterprise is "higher education" should find a way to sustain it without undermining the UO's integrity by causing administrators to shift priorities from academics to athletics. [I tell you - and I know you're tired of hearing it - quotation marks are almost always a bad idea... Just dump them.]

I urge everyone to write Frohnmayer ([email protected]). If people want sports in a big way, I encourage them to work toward an athletic program that respects and promotes the UO's educational mission.' [...not one that moves our musicians into the men's room...Something like that would've been nice... Could even have picked up on his "palace" thing up there and contrasted the sports palace to the academic toilet...]

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I know you [The letter is addressed to the president of the university] do not need any negative letters: However, I feel [In general, and especially in polemical writing, avoid "I feel." It's girly and emotive - it weakens your voice immediately.] this story needs to be told [Chief Illinewhatever: The Greatest Story Ever Told. We are already a bit out of our sphere, rhetoric-wise.].

I hold you, the Board of Trustees, your complete staff, and the Alumni Association responsible as the decision makers for the University of Illinois. ["Complete staff" begins to suggest a problem that will recur in what follows. This writer has never seen a noun he doesn't think deserves an adjective. Why "complete" staff? It's his vehemence, of course -- he's full of feeling. Yet the effect of this phrase - your complete staff - is, given the multiple meanings of staff, and the personal mode of address, just amusing.]

You have meekly surrendered [not just surrendered, but meekly] the pride of the university to a tiny group (perhaps a half dozen) of activists (with no apparent motive other than a desire for publicity) in opposition to the expressed feelings of hundreds of thousands of loyal alumni [tiny group, loyal alumni].

Where is the old Illini fighting spirit? [Cliche.] This abject capitulation [abject] to this minuscule [miniscule] minority and to the NCAA, a dictatorial organization that needs to be cut down to size [Much as UD enjoys NCAA-bashing, this latest adjective -- dictatorial -- won't do.], is ridiculous and totally unrepresentative of [a] great institution.

As I understand it, other universities have fought the NCAA decisions successfully. If we need to go to court, let’s go!

I am convinced this type of subservient wind blowing [A subservient wind's a blowin' -- You knew we'd get into mixed metaphor territory eventually.] throughout the country is a major contributor to our falling cultural and family values [Off the rails here.]. Our majorities are overly anxious to bow to minorities, whether justified or not. [?]

In your case, as the decision-makers, whatever your legacy might have been to date [Bit of a brain twister: Your legacy to date...], hereafter, you will be remembered as the ones who spinelessly gave away the Illini’s richest and most cherished tradition, Chief Illiniwek. [Tone all over the place. Bitter Teaparty: hereafter, legacy. Onfield heckler: spineless...]


As for myself? Raised in Champaign, I have been an Illini fan all my life back to the days of Red Grange and Bob Zuppke when we used to crawl under the fence to see the ball game -- and the Chief! Later of course came Dike Eddleman and all the other great Illini. We attend all home football and basketball games. [Fine old American boilerplate. I have no problem with this.]

Including my brothers and my children, my immediate family holds eight degrees from the University of Illinois. Now it is disheartening that just as the university and the Alumni Association are widely soliciting funds -- and just at the time I and other old alumni are considering preparations for a, perhaps, longer journey [Is this a reference to his impending death?], you pull this trick.

My wife, Pauline, suggests the University might get a chicken for a mascot.

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'Call it the ExhibitioNet. [Samuelson wants to start with a bang, so he contrives this clever name for the exhibitionistic internet: ExhibitioNet. Only the name's not clever. Result: Inauspicious first sentence.] It turns out that the Internet has unleashed the greatest outburst of mass exhibitionism in human history. [The word - the concept - exhibitionism - is too broad for the use Samuelson seems to want to make of it here. As a writer who has written for decades about private as well as public matters in tons of different media, Samuelson is, by the vague measure he's about to offer, much more exhibitionistic than the people he attacks.] Everyone may not be entitled, as Andy Warhol once suggested, to 15 minutes of fame. [Lazy writer. The Warhol quotation is dead in the water, having been cited everywhere by everyone. And cast your eye to the end of Samuelson's essay: He'll also quote Thoreau on quiet desperation. Surpassing writerly sloth.] But everyone is entitled to strive for 15 minutes -- or 30, 90 or much more. We have blogs, "social networking" sites (MySpace.com, Facebook), YouTube and all their rivals. Everything about these sites is a scream for attention. Look at me. Listen to me. Laugh with me -- or at me. [Again, as a tireless promoter of his own experiences through decades of writing, Samuelson is hardly in a position to complain about other people. Unless, of course, he thinks he's better than other people, more deserving of air time. I'd be willing to consider his case for himself on this score, but he doesn't make it in this tossed-off plaint. Further, at no point in this opinion piece will Samuelson note that his traditional media -- judging by his bio, I'd guess he's in his sixties -- which are newspapers and magazines, are struggling to keep up with the new media he's describing as worthless and narcissistic. It would be more honest of him to mention the threat these new forms pose to writers like him rather than attacking them all as primal screams.]

This is no longer fringe behavior. MySpace has 56 million American "members." Facebook -- which started as a site for college students and has expanded to high school students and others -- has 9 million members. (For the unsavvy: MySpace and Facebook allow members to post personal pages with pictures and text.) About 12 million American adults (8 percent of Internet users) blog, estimates the Pew Internet & American Life Project. YouTube -- a site where anyone can post home videos -- says 100 million videos are watched daily.

Exhibitionism is now a big business. In 2005 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace for a reported $580 million. [Newspapers like the ones Samuelson writes for are shrinking businesses. Why?] All these sites aim to make money, mainly through ads and fees. [This describes very few blogs. But then Samuelson is bundling all of these very different online forms of writing into one big nasty.] What's interesting culturally and politically is that their popularity contradicts the belief that people fear the Internet will violate their right to privacy. In reality, millions of Americans are gleefully discarding -- or at least cheerfully compromising -- their right to privacy. They're posting personal and intimate stuff in places where thousands or millions can see it. [Samuelson's details about his kids' college choices, which he recently wrote about in Newsweek, are in some way different from this.]

People seem to crave popularity or celebrity more than they fear the loss of privacy. Some of this extroversion is crass self-promotion. The Internet is a cheap way to advertise ideas and projects. Anyone can post a video on YouTube, free; you can start a blog free (some companies don't charge for "hosting" a site). Last week a popular series of videos -- Lonelygirl15 -- on YouTube was revealed to be a scripted drama, written by three aspiring filmmakers, and not a teenager's random meditations.

But the ExhibitioNet is more than a marketing tool. The same impulse that inspires people to spill their guts on "Jerry Springer" or to participate in "reality TV" shows (MTV's "The Real World" and its kin) has now found a mass outlet. MySpace aims at an 18-to-34-year-old audience; many of the pages are proudly raunchy. U.S. News & World Report recently described MySpace as "Lake Wobegon gone horribly wrong: a place where all the women are fast [and] the men are hard-drinking."

The blogosphere is often seen as mainly a political arena. That's a myth. According to the Pew estimates, most bloggers (37 percent) focus on "my life and personal experiences." Politics and government are a very distant second (11 percent), followed by entertainment (7 percent) and sports (6 percent). Even these figures may exaggerate the importance of politics. Half of bloggers say they're mainly interested in expressing themselves "creatively." [At this point in his piece, Samuelson looks like a resentful codger, anxiously dissing a new technology putting real political writers like himself out of business.]

Self-revelation and attitude are what seem to appeal. Heather Armstrong maintains one of the most popular personal blogs (Dooce.com). "I never had a cup of coffee until I was 23-years-old," she writes. "I had premarital sex for the first time at age 22, but BY GOD I waited an extra year for the coffee." She started her blog in 2001, got fired from her job as a Web designer in Los Angeles for writing about work ("My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID."), became "an unemployed drunk," got married and moved to Salt Lake City, where she had a child.

Armstrong is a graceful and often funny writer. ("I am no longer a practicing Mormon or someone who believes that Rush Limbaugh speaks to God. My family is understandably disappointed.") The popular site now has so many ads that her husband quit his job. Recent postings include an ode to her 2-year-old daughter, a story about her dog and a plug for her friend Maggie's book, "No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog." Idea No. 32: breaking up. Naturally, Armstrong expounds on her busted relationships.

Up to a point, the blogs and "social networking" sites represent new forms of electronic schmoozing -- extensions of e-mail and instant messaging. What's different is the undiluted passion for self-publicity. [Again, there's no way around the compromising position a writer like Samuelson, himself a self-promoter, has now put himself in.] But even among the devoted, there are occasional doubts about whether this is all upside. Facebook recently announced a new service. Its computers would regularly scan the pages of its members and flash news of the latest postings as headlines to their friends' pages. There was an uproar. Suppose your girlfriend decides she's had enough. The potential headline to your pals: "Susan dumps George." Countless students regarded the relentless electronic snooping and automatic messaging as threatening -- "stalking," as many put it. Facebook modified the service by allowing members to opt out.

The larger reality is that today's exhibitionism may last a lifetime. What goes on the Internet often stays on the Internet. Something that seems harmless, silly or merely impetuous today may seem offensive, stupid or reckless in two weeks, two years or two decades. Still, we are clearly at a special moment. Thoreau famously remarked that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Thanks to technology, that's no longer necessary. People can now lead lives of noisy and ostentatious desperation. Or at least they can try.' [All reasonable people agree that much of what goes on online is crude, self-serving, idiotic, and sometimes dangerous. But by throwing all screen activity into one smelly pot, and by assuming a condescending point of view, Samuelson has repelled readers looking for nuanced appraisals of new technologies and forms of expression.]

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"The task of the modern educator," wrote C.S. Lewis more than half a century ago, "is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts." [Warning light: Lewis is a very condescending writer. I've never been able to stand his simplistic, hectoring style. I know, I know -- a lot of wonderful, smart people love him. And he's written some wonderful stuff. But when I read his essays on Christianity, for instance, I really feel talked down to. And this quotation from him is typical of his elliptical, rather silly style: Isn't the task of education to do both? To brush away destructive overgrowth and to put something sustaining in its place?] The Oxford don [This is supposed to impress us, and I suppose it does. But the writer of this piece should also disclose that Lewis was often writing in defense of a specifically Christian world view.] suggests by this statement that the college classroom is at its best when it is a place where unformed minds confront a lofty standard, in the hope that students will rise and follow the exalted example. At its worst, college educators enter the academic arena determined to "cut down jungles" of prejudice and replace them with their own beliefs.

The Clemson committee selection of the book "Truth and Beauty" by Ann Patchett shows education at its "cutting down jungles" worst.

For those who haven't read the book, the Amazon.com summary provides a glimpse into its purpose. "This memoir of (Ann) Patchett's friendship with ... Lucy Grealy shows many insights into the nature of devotion ... moving from the unfolding of their deep connection in graduate school into the more turbulent waters beyond." Patchett describes their attempts to be writers, while Grealy endures continuous rounds of operations as a result of cancer, as well as "heartbreak and drug use."

The moral theme of friendship in the book is lost in mind-numbing descriptions of reckless sexual liaisons, affairs with married men and students, financial irresponsibility and abortion. In the words of a local pastor in his letter to President James Barker, "Lucy eventually pays the price ... not for these mistakes, but for her false sense of invincibility. Little is done to dissipate the moral fog, even by the book's end." [The reader's suspicion that this opinion piece is about Christian morality rather than education in itself is now heightened.]

This is where the selection committee failed the incoming freshmen at Clemson by making this universally assigned reading. They did not consider that, in the words of John Gardner in his book "On Moral Fiction," "art is essentially and primarily moral -- that is, life-giving -- in its process of creation and moral in what it says." In the end, Patchett's book doesn't succeed for the same reason her friend didn't survive: because she has no moral standard to offer to pull her back from the brink. [This may be true; but even if it is, this writer has given us no reason not to be interested in this failure, to find it enlightening.]

At one point Ann Patchett says to Lucy, "I'm not going to try to solve your problems, I just want to make you happy." The author's work is supposed to be about love, but it reads more like manipulation and dependency. Ann leaves her friend in a self-destructive lifestyle [Never use the word "lifestyle." Drop "style" to get to the word you mean.], which ends in death [All lives do.]. She violates one of the sacred responsibilities of what college students call a "relationship" [Why "what college students call"?]: the obligation to help.

Cicero said in 44 B.C. that "friendship lightens adversity by dividing and sharing it." The Bible says in the book of Proverbs, "faithful are the wounds of a friend." Both understand that friendship involves uncomfortable commitments to confront and intervene.

Whenever possible, good literature should do the same thing. Good art should hold up models of decent behavior in contrast to destructive ones. [Yikes. That would be no fun at all. And what does "whenever possible" mean??] One need only think of the lasting literary works: "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles; Virgil's "Aenid," the plays of Shakespeare; the novels of Tolstoy and Melville. These works have a civilizing effect century after century, long after he cultures that produced them have decayed. [Talk about a selective list. And Melville doesn't belong on it.]

Characters in good fiction -- who struggle against confusion, error and evil both in themselves and in others -- can offer us firm intellectual and emotional examples in our own struggles. Scout's defense of Atticus, and her recognition of Mr. Cunningham at the jailhouse door, in the book and movie "To Kill a Mockingbird" may have done more to dissipate racial prejudice in the South than a dozen laws. Storytelling has great power in a culture, and that is why we must be careful which ones we endorse. [I wondered when the twentieth century would rear its head. Note that the choice is a high school favorite because of its heavy-handed morality and undemanding style.]

Compare the freshman reading at Clemson with that at the University of South Carolina. The book being read in Columbia is by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder, and is titled "Mountains Beyond Mountains." Again, the Amazon.com description tells you all you need to know. "The title ... is a metaphor for life -- once you have scaled one mountain there are more to come ... this is especially true for Paul Farmer, MD, who has devoted his life to what he calls the 'impossible' task of trying to cure infectious diseases worldwide." At the center of the book is a doctor who is selfless in solving one problem after another, far different from Lucy's self-absorption. [If college literature courses do anything, they inculcate a loathing for Climb Every Mountain moral uplift metaphors.]

Clemson University is justifiably proud of its new ranking as a top 30 public university, and of its more than 100 new faculty members. But in the selection of its freshman reading project, Clemson is a poor second to USC. The former adopted the "cut down" approach to education, while the latter chose to "irrigate" the minds of its incoming students.

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For many students, college is an intellectual rite of passage. [Let's not go overboard. For some students.]

The beliefs that students bring to the classroom often collide with what they learn. [Rather awkwardly phrased. And "collide," while a good enough metaphor, will soon start colliding with the writer's many other metaphors.] Professors push students to think critically.

But some Arizona lawmakers think that push has gone too far. They want to tame what they see as left-leaning professors at state universities who they contend wield an unhealthful influence over Arizona's younger minds. [Clunky writing. Very clunky writing. Mixed metaphors, first off. Professors are not merely pushers now, but beasts that must be tamed. "Arizona's younger minds" is somehow both a cliche and bizarre.]

Their response is a string of proposals that opponents fear could quash academic freedom. [It's the rare string that's tough enough to quash anything.] The efforts reflect a nationwide trend being fueled by conservative activists. [Fueled... See the problem? Any one of these many metaphors might be okay, but when you throw all sorts of them at us, it makes a mess.]

In Arizona, the moves include:


• A bill enabling students to refuse assignments they find sexually offensive. It failed in March but compelled Arizona's Board of Regents to pass a resolution supporting academic freedom and advance notice to students of a course's content.[This writing is fine, and UD certainly finds the idea of advance notice to her students of offensive sexual course content intriguing. As someone who teaches Molly Bloom's soliloquy and things like it virtually every semester, she thinks the most pragmatic path for her would be a large sign on her office door:

NOTICE!!

The following sex acts will be performed in the written material assigned in Professor Soltan's literature classes:

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2.....]

• An "Academic Bill of Rights," which Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, plans to introduce next year. Pearce and other legislators hope to meet with David Horowitz, a national activist who lives in Los Angeles, for help in drawing up the bill, which they say would keep liberal bias out of the classroom.


• A law passed in the spring that requires schools to display the U.S. flag and Constitution in every classroom. It puts patriotic symbols in front of every professor and student. [This ought to keep the mind off prurient matters.]

The proposals reflect a distrust of professors among some ranking legislators on higher-education committees.

"University professors lean liberal and not conservative," said Sen. Linda Gray, R-Phoenix, chairwoman of the Senate's Higher Education Committee. "They contribute to society accepting immoral behavior. (The classroom) is where they get to the mind."

Gray said public universities typically do not provide examples of "what a good, normal family life is." [A+ for honesty.]


Student complaints


Last school year, no student at Arizona's three major universities filed a complaint saying professors imposed their views and values in class. [Clearly a problem demanding legislative response.]

Still, allegations have come to light, one of which led to the bill on offensive coursework.

At Chandler-Gilbert Community College, a student was so offended last year by a book in Professor Bill Mullaney's literature and film class that he asked for an alternative assignment.

The 1994 book, The Ice Storm by Rick Moody, deals with two suburban families in the 1970s that engage in sexual experimentation.

Mullaney refused to offer another assignment, saying he presented the syllabus on the first day of class. He told students some of the material might be offensive and that they could drop the class.

The student filed a grievance with the school. School officials rejected the student's request, instead offering him another class. The student refused and took the matter to Sen. Thayer Verschoor, R-Gilbert.

Verschoor sponsored a bill that would have allowed university and community college students to refuse any assignment that depicts or describes sexual activity in a "patently offensive way." The Senate defeated it 17-12. Public debate led the Board of Regents to pass its resolution. [What a lot of trouble! UD already proposed a simpler solution.]



'Bill of Rights'


The most controversial attempt to influence college classrooms is Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights.

Lawmakers in 18 states have weighed resolutions supporting some form of the document. Georgia was the only state that approved one, although the university systems of Tennessee, Ohio and Colorado adopted policies that espoused its tenets.

Rep. Laura Knaperek, R-Tempe, who heads two higher-education committees, said the bill to be proposed here next year will be based on Horowitz's version.

"I have heard more and more over the years that there is less and less tolerance for conservative opinions," she said.

Faculty members widely view the bill as an attempt to subvert academic freedom, the opposite of what Horowitz claims.

Wanda Howell, a University of Arizona professor and faculty chair, argues that the bill would put state government and university administration in charge of the classroom. Professors no longer would be in control of what or how they taught, or how they graded.

In the name of "academic diversity," professors say, professors could be forced to censor certain materials.

Horowitz insists his Academic Bill of Rights is "viewpoint neutral." [Tell Senator Gray.]

"It is to ensure that professors take a scholarly, academic approach in the classroom, so professors teach students how to think, not what to think," Horowitz said. "It goes for right-wingers (too). It goes for anyone."

Surveys support the common belief: Most professors are liberal.


Liberal professors


A 2005 study by American and Canadian professors indicated that 72 percent of those teaching at U.S. colleges and universities identified themselves as liberal. Only 15 percent called themselves conservative.

Several students said professors' liberal views tend to spill out [Okay. You want to go with "spill out." Fine. Stay with it for just a paragraph!] in classrooms in subtle and overt ways. It [What does "it" refer to here? "Views" is plural...] can trigger [Spills out and triggers.] lively debates but also intimidate some students.

Blake Rebling, 19, president of the UA College Republicans, said he typically doesn't challenge his liberal professors' opinions because they control his grades.

[NOTICE: OBSCENE MATERIAL.] "I don't want to risk going to law school over that," the political science major said.

Several professors said instructors should present issues without personal bias and allow for a variety of viewpoints. Teachers should not impose their personal beliefs, and a grade should never depend on a student's political opinion.

UA political science Professor John Willerton, who specializes in Russia and the former Soviet Union, sees that as the responsibility of the teacher. He grades students on the coherence of their work.

"I want people to think carefully about stereotypical thinking, conventional wisdom. Is the essay well-reasoned with a good introduction and conclusion, and does it have an argument I can find?"

But when Willerton does take a stance, he loves a good debate.

"I really respect a student who will challenge me," he said. "I don't want a toady. I don't want someone who will mimic me."

Ruth Jones, vice provost for academic programs and a political science professor at Arizona State University, said some professors may cross the line but she doesn't think it's widespread.

She sits on a standards committee that would handle the types of cases that conservatives say are rampant in today's college classrooms. She has never had one.

"The question is: Are we dealing with reality or perception?" Jones said. "Is there a common denominator among students complaining? Sometimes, students are used (by others) to promote an agenda. We need to look at that."

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I remember a man across the ward who was 86 years old, stone deaf, who shouted very loudly and was mentally flitting through the twilight zone. The doctors seemed to think he might have had a stroke in his fall at home; his family simply ignored his ravings, as if they had known his behaviour for a long time.

Next to him was a young man of Islander background who had been in some sort of fight. His mates came and he swanked around, making moves and swaying his hips, laughing about the violence. His big sister was on the mobile talking about someone else who had been arrested over the incident. But that night, when everyone else had gone home, I heard him sobbing in his mother’s arms.

Beyond the curtain at my side was a Czech chippie, who got away from the Russians in the fifties. Eighty years old, still smooth skinned and strongly built, he lives with his wife who is five years older on a piece of land somewhere in the hills. His eyes lit up when he talked of his two ponies. Lying there patiently, waiting for his heart to calm, I felt like he was an inspiration, a direction for a life well lived.

My identity is as a raft skidding or gliding, borne on a flux of feelings and frights, including the morning’s delusion (which lasts ten minutes sometimes) of being young and whole.

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'Hazing is good for America. Those of us who have been through fraternity (and some sorority) initiations, at one time a hallowed part of campus life, know that they develop shared feelings of honor and pride. [Warning light. “Shared feelings of honor and pride” is major blahblah. Let us see if the writer can be more precise.] But such rituals have been toned down in today's no-risk, litigious, surveillance society. [The surveillance that brought the recent hazing cases to light was the students’ own Face Book activities. The writer seems to want us to think that the FBI’s been filming our kids.] Where once we accepted the rough-and-tumble of youth culture, now everything is examined through the thorny eyes of lawyers. [Thorny?]

Recently, Northwestern University suspended some members of the women's soccer team from some 2006-07 regular-season games for hazing. Some players also received probation and others unspecified "additional disciplinary action." The men's swim team and the Northwestern Wildcat mascot squad also were punished in separate incidents.

The truth is that in almost all instances hazing is not harmful. Girls will be girls (and boys, boys) and any punishment will be ineffective. [These happy vapid cliches tell you that the writer thinks you‘re really dumb.] And hazing rituals have real benefits.

Initiations require mutual support and bonding [I think he means bondage] among members. The initiates give up some of their dignity, smudge their reputations [This professor is keen, by the way, on the subject of “reputation.” “My research focuses on negative or difficult reputations, and at the moment my attention deals with the reputation of Adolf Hitler,” he tells us on his research page.], because they know that others in the group will have done the same. [Logic seems lacking here. Why would you debase yourself because other people debase themselves? Isn’t this simply the most pathetic conformism?] They gain a confidence that their mates will support them through college and after. [Why? Because their mates have humiliated them?] Those more senior know that the initiates wish to join with such intensity that they are willing to let themselves be humiliated. [“Wish to join with such intensity.“ More and more pathetic.] You agree to become the butt of a collective joke, shrouded in secrecy. No one will ever know, so one's public self is preserved. [Particular fraternities’ hazing procedures are broadly known on most campuses.]

Being told that you're going to eat worms, strip to your skivvies, or chug a few beers while being paddled is not everyone's idea of fun. But it is precisely the willingness to put up with these uncomfortable (and sometimes painful) antics that indicates you care deeply about membership. [Wish to join with such intensity. Care deeply about membership. If debasing yourself in order to join a group is so attractive to you, why not become a Moonie?] The group matters. Initiates give up part of their personal reputation to acquire the benefits of the reputation of the team. And this strengthens the group and the person. [Straight out of the Hitler Youth training manual.]

Indeed, what is striking about the women's soccer initiation at Northwestern is that all reports suggest the women participated voluntarily and considered it fun. [Right.]

Granted, initiations can go too far. Some rules are essential (no sexual contact, reasonable boundaries on physical punishment, and, most significantly, demands that the organizers refrain from alcohol). Excessive practices often occur when authorities prohibit initiations. [Note that “excessive practices” -- lovely phrase -- do not originate with students who come up with the idea of adding alcohol or sadism to the proceedings all by themselves. They originate with the authorities.] When we do not teach teenagers how to drink responsibly, they learn to drink rapidly and to excess. When initiations are pushed underground, they are re-created without tradition [I think we’ve all been moved by the traditions we've seen represented in the recent photographs of hazing.] and sometimes without boundaries. When universities do not learn that bonding rituals are valid and valuable, they respond with fear and create foolish rules that encourage violations.

Initiations were once tied mostly to the doings of college men. Perhaps the sexist idea that this rough sport was acceptable for boys led to a greater acceptance of these rituals. However, female athletes and sorority members are now quite as wild as their male counterparts. And good for them. Bonding used to be a male activity, but now female bonding serves the same valid purposes as they did for their brothers.

However, one rule should be inviolable. No Internet pictures. Today the tut-tut images of young adults romping in their panties, downing brews, being bound with tape or giving lap dances on Web sites such as badjocks.com combine smarmy voyeurism with unctuous morality, the worst of both worlds. [I don’t understand this sentence. The fellow’s a bad writer, yes; so bad that reading him feels like a sorority initiation. But I’ve at least understood his words up to this point.] For hazing to have its positive effects, it must separate the group from those outside to create a powerful connection among members.

College administrators may want to punish students for their violations, but these are rules that no one needs or wants.

Left alone, these students will create connections that will serve them for life. Just ask President Bush and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and their Skull and Bones brothers.' [Reread this piece’s first sentence. The writer turns out to be a keen George Bush fan.]

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Labels: SOS

'UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS HYPOCRITES'

[This is not a very good title. It comes from today’s Mobile Register, and it’s settin’ way up top a regular column by a regular guy whose writing UD will now examine with a fine tooth comb. Examine with a fine tooth comb is a cliché. Avoid cliches.]

[Why is this a bad title? It’s a YOU SUCK title. It doesn’t carry any information, and as a broad sweeping indictment (Broad sweeping indictment is a cliché. Avoid.) it is untrue.]

'At times like these [Cliché], we need William Shakespeare more than ever [The writer is probably about to quote Shakespeare. This will almost certainly be a cliché.]

Something tells me the renowned playwright [You might say the cliché ‘renowned playwright’ is necessary here because without this identifier your audience wouldn’t know who Shakespeare was. But then you’d be insulting your audience.] might amend one of his most famous (if often misunderstood) lines from Henry VI: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." [Cliché.]

If Shakespeare were writing a sports column today instead of being intently studied across the world [Failed attempts at whimsical humor depress your readers and make them reluctant to continue reading. Dropping the ‘instead of‘ clause would help, but only a little.] , he would likely add to his great line, "and college presidents, as well."

Someone needs to help these poor people in the bowties [Virtually no college presidents wear bow ties, and the one he’s about to attack certainly doesn’t. This is a class cliché -- the author will attempt here and elsewhere to play on the populist prejudices of his readers.] before they seriously injure someone with their clumsiness and utter pomposity. [The writer has failed to heed the renowned poet Yeats’s great line about casting a cold eye. From his angry title on, he has chosen heat over cold. Having done that, he’s making things worse by using intensifiers like “utter.” Cold writing -- especially when you want to arouse the wrath of your reader -- always works better than hot.]



The latest case in point comes from the president of the University of Georgia, Michael Adams. To meet him is to immediately dislike him. He is supercilious and self-righteous, haughty and highbrow. [UD has seen Adams in action and she can confirm all of this. Yet it’s a mistake to include it in this piece. It’s ad hominem -- pointlessly cutting. Tends to make your reader want to rush to his defense. Nothing wrong with being highbrow, by the way. Notice how the writer tacks it on at the end of a list of traits that are in fact offensive. Again the writer plays on his ostensibly lowbrow audience‘s prejudices, thereby implicitly putting down his audience.] And those are some of his better traits.

Adams, who committed one of the single dumbest acts in recent SEC history by running Vince Dooley out of his office as athletics director, said this week he wants the television networks to quit referring to the annual Georgia-Florida football game as "the world's largest outdoor cocktail party." [This paragraph’s fine.]

Sends the wrong message, he declares. [Ditto.]

Adams isn't alone. The good folks at [Cliché.] Florida joined the PC parade [Cliché.]. The actions come after a Florida student apparently was beaten to death during the game weekend. Police said the death had no direct correlation [Tone’s off here. Why not just say “connection”? Direct correlation makes you sound highbrow.] to the game. However, considering it was the second year in a row a student died in Jacksonville, the site of the game, the administrators decided to be proactive to try to deflect attention away from the annual drunkfest [“Annual drunkfest“ is fine. But again there‘s a weird wavering in tone in this paragraph between highbrow jargon like proactive and correlation and nice downhome stuff like drunkfest.].

SEC commissioner Mike Slive, a man who usually governs by common sense and compassion, also has gone along with this gibberish. How disappointing. Perhaps he had no choice.



So tell me this: How is CBS' or ESPN's failure to mention the game's name going to save lives in Jacksonville during the last weekend in October? It has nothing to do with it. The administrators are doing it for the same reason that beer commercials often end with the admonition to "drink responsibly." Know when to say when, huh? And while you're at, would you like another Bud?

Ever seen a beer commercial during a college sporting event? I have. If the president at Georgia or any of these people are so concerned about drinking or the image of college sports, then why do they allow their teams to compete in between beer commercials -- usually portraying scantily clad women mud-wrestling -- while the young and impressionable youth of America are watching? [In this section our writer’s getting to the point, and he’s not doing too badly. Still, the youth are the young, so he should probably have found a different word for one of those two words.]

Simple: They want to have it both ways.

Have any of you ever seen anyone drinking alcohol in one of the almighty private luxury boxes [Populist button flashing.] during an Alabama or Auburn football game? I have. Those are the suites that, by the way, go for enormous sums of money to support the football program, and there's enough drinking going on in those places to permanently destroy a breathalyzer machine. [I like “destroy a breathalyzer machine.” But again, the writer doesn’t need the intensifier “permanently,” and in fact this awkward word takes some of the punch out of an otherwise good phrase. One good way to have written it would be “and there‘s enough drinking going down in them to destroy a breathalyzer.” Everyone knows a breathalyzer is a machine, and it‘s better to end your sentence on your strongest word.] It's a like fraternity rush party at the "AARP House." [I like this too, but I’d remove the quotation marks from AARP House.]

Take away the booze in those places if you want to send a message. Of course, it might be tough to sell them if the fat-cat [Yikes. Not merely a cliché, but a circa 1900 cliché. Again he’s after the populist vote.] alums had to watch the game cold sober [Cliché.].

Does anyone really think there would be college sports without beer commercials or gambling? Take away the beer money. Take away the point spread. Then let's talk turkey. [Gevalt.] These administrators want to have their cake and eat it, too. [GeVALT.] They want to talk out of both sides of their mouths. [GEVALT.]

They don't mind holding fat cats [So nice he uses it twice.] hostage with premium sums of money attached to selling season tickets or priority seating. They don't mind bowing down to networks to start games at 10 a.m. on New Year's Day or allowing some Saturday night games to go on until midnight. It's a nice drive home from Auburn or Tuscaloosa to Mobile or anywhere at that time of night.

These folks are phony and fraudulent but apparently think society is being served when a moniker attached to a football game is removed.

Perhaps we should be more understanding of today's breed of college presidents. [Ten ton sarcasm never works well.] These individuals didn't rise to a position of authority and importance because they were great teachers or researchers or leaders. That is the way things used to be. Instead, to become a college president nowadays, you have to be a politician. You have to be able to talk out of both sides of your mouth. [In case you missed it the first time.]

Instead of straight talk from our college leaders, we get drivel. [Yick.] We get presidents trying to talk down to us instead of directly to us. [Populist vote-getter at it again. By painstakingly identifying Shakespeare for your readers you‘ve talked down to them too.] We get people who all speak from a particular manual. It's a basic course called Hypocrisy 101. [Cliché.] It's being taught on almost every big-time college campus these days by the person sitting in the president's office.'

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'Breast-Feeding Display On Campus To Raise Awareness

Breast-feeding in public is what six women did Wednesday in a very public arena at the [University of Texas] campus.

They say, whether you squirm or not, they have the right to feed their children wherever they are. [Pronoun reference?]

Forget the argument: is breast-feeding good or bad for a baby? The issue many women have is a baby can get hungry anytime, and if they're breast-feeding, they may just be in a coffee shop or restaurant when they feel the need to feed. [Overuse of the “to be” verb. And again pronoun confusion.]

The women who were breast-feeding on campus Wednesday say they shouldn't be made to feel ashamed.

Does the site of breast-feeding make you uncomfortable? [Spelling? Do you mean to ask me whether the place of b-f makes me uncomfortable, or the “sight” of b-f?]

A public feed [This phrase is new to me and conjures images of pigs in a trough. I don’t think this association is what you want.] on UT campus with moms and babies was both a public art demonstration and a very public statement. [Whoa. Was this installation art and a protest? You need to clarify that earlier in the piece.]

"In our society, breasts are conceived of in a sexual manner in advertising, in magazines and what not," art student Brooke Gassiot said. [Is this the most intelligent comment you were able to elicit?]

Gassiot is an artist, a student and a mother.

"It's nothing to do with sex. It's completely normal. It's feeding. It's eating. That's why I wanted to have a dinner with these mothers, so it re-enforces the idea that we're just eating. We're just feeding our children," Gassiot said. [Again, were you able only to find someone who believes that the sight of breasts has nothing to do with sex? Who believes that people think breast-feeding is abnormal?]

Public breast-feeding has been an issue for years. Some think it ought to be kept in the home. The moms who were on campus have a different opinion.

"Breast-feeding in public is sort of, I guess, taboo. So, I got a lot of stares. But, it hasn't stopped me in any way from breast-feeding," mother Virla Jameson said.

"I'm kind of shy, and that's the reason I decided to do this. Just to kind of show how important it is and to help me also get over my shyness of breast-feeding in public," mother Charlotte Bergdorf said.

It is still an issue, one that has prompted some businesses to post signs that breast-feeding is welcomed. [Example, please. Better yet, a photo. I have never seen a BREAST-FEEDING WELCOME sign, and am having trouble imagining what sort of business -- outside of a sex shop -- would hang one.]'

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DUKE LACROSSE SCANDAL WILL HAVE
AFFECTS [Effects] FELT FAR BEYOND DURHAM

Looking at the ramifications of the
Duke situation on Division I Lacrosse


As I mentioned in my column last week, I am not in a position to editorialize [about?] the legal ramifications of the Duke Lacrosse scandal. We will all have to wait until the facts circumvent [circumvent? Do you mean surface?] before we can really pass judgment. In the meantime, it is not fair to burry [bury?] any person, or group of people for that matter before the facts are revealed. After dissecting this situation (on the field), I would like to shed some light [you've gone from burial to dissection to illumination -- a rather awkward set of metaphors] on how this adversely affects the Division I season and Duke Lacrosse. I have come up with the following thoughts. [Drop this sentence.]

Scheduling

Is it fair to the opponents of Duke to have to continue with their season without knowing the permanent status of the team's (Duke) season? [Awkward sentence in terms of pronoun reference and redundancy.] Game planning and routines for teams is critical in a sport that has a season as short as lacrosse. If you are a coach that has a date scheduled with Duke this season, when will you find out the status of the game? Or, in the event the game is cancelled, how do you feel about having potentially fourteen days between games (many teams play Saturday games only at this point in the season [close parenthesis needed here] ? Some teams handle time off well, while others play their best ball when they are on the field as much as possible. I know if I coached a young team that had a date with Duke ["date with Duke" is good -- alliteration, etc.] , I would not be happy with the time off, as I would want my team with less experience to be able to play ball, and gain valuable game experience before playoff time. Many people have brought up the fact [you are referring to a claim, not a fact] that common opponents that Duke has had to cancel should schedule games against one another if they do not have scheduled date[s?] already. Negative. The NCAA ruled a few years back when teams would pick-up late season games with cupcake competition [cute] to pad (getting wins to become playoff eligible) its season record. Games are limited to begin with, and yes, one contest can make or break a season. Why should a team that had Duke on its schedule suffer?

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