He’s a philosophy
professor, and, in
this the age of the
faked memoir, we
need to approach
him with caution.

He has produced, at a young age, a trove of books and articles — essays, monographs, short stories, novels — much of it accomplished, as he describes it, while disablingly, suicidally, drunk. If ever there were an argument in favor of alcoholism as a career-maker, this is it.

His faculty page photograph up there has him as the classic sensitive confused infantile genius: Dressed in black, hair askew, hand in front of his face as if he’s smoking or appalled or weeping. A Kierkegaardian, a Nietzschean, he’s overwhelmed by the anguish of existence.

His just-released novel, autobiographical, displays the - again - classic mix of I’m Sorry for My Past Degeneracy and Admire the Depth of My Past Degeneracy. Apparently there will be a movie.

In a London Review of Books piece about his recent suicide attempt, he describes his thoughts at an AA meeting: “As I looked around the room I thought: yes, I am officially a loser.”

Yet who could believe this? He’s a winner, with the world at his feet, canny enough to time his shocking self-revelations with the release of his latest novel.

A loser? Consider this:

On 200 mg a day of baclofen, in an important meeting with several associate deans of my college and three new department chairs (I was made chair of my philosophy department just a few weeks before I tried to commit suicide), I fell asleep with my head on the conference room table and, for 40 minutes, everyone was too embarrassed to wake me. Somnolence is the most obvious and inconvenient side effect of baclofen. I reduced my dosage to 100 mg a day, and started taking it only at bedtime. A few days later, a colleague asked if I had changed my medicine. ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘Why do you ask?’ She is German, an analytic philosopher, and therefore very direct: ‘You are drooling less than you were.’

There’s quite a bit to be said about this paragraph, even if we don’t comment on the sequence of events by which shortly after you’re made chair of a department you try to kill yourself.

The main thing to be said is Wow. Universities.

Very few places of work feature people who make someone who drools head of their enterprise.

A troubled person, this person, a new department chair, sleeps through his first meeting with the deans.

He sleeps for forty minutes. The dean are embarrassed but polite, and no one disturbs him.

Wow. Universities.

Source: Margaret Soltan

From CBS Sports:

… [College coaches and administrators tend to be] contemptuously dismissive … of everyone outside their industry as a general rule of behavior.

Or maybe you didn’t catch the Columbus Dispatch series on the systematic and deliberate misuse of the Buckley Amendment, which was designed to shield student report cards and transcripts but has now been extended by many schools to include gambling, accepted payoffs, cheating, cashing on an athlete’s notoriety, recruiting violations, academic fraud, rule-breaking boosters and even sexual abuse.

Or maybe you missed the news from so many schools where athletes promised scholarships have them taken away just because the coach recruited someone better.

Or Nick Saban getting a contract extension at Alabama that has no buyout clause, meaning that he can leave whenever he wants without any penalty whatsoever. Or San Diego State trying to figure out how to stiff the fired Chuck Long out of money they contractually owe him.

Ahh, the inspiration value of commitment … just makes you swell up with pride, doesn’t it?

This is all part and parcel of the wonderful world of college football, where emperors, dictators and, yes, even the Russian Presidium marvel at the powers granted to any even moderately successful program. The influence the industry wields without any mind to sensible oversight, or even any oversight at all, is breath-taking.

… [This is college] athletics’ essential stance to the outside world — one hand outstretched to hold the cash, one hand held aloft with the middle finger prominent. …

Source: Margaret Soltan

… [T]here is a fine line between strong support and simply giving [football coach Nick] Saban absolute power. This is still the University of Alabama, right? This is not the University of Nick Saban.

What you have now is a scared straight school president and a spineless Board of Trustees, particularly when it concerns Saban.

… [A]t some point this summer, the university will proudly announce that Nick Saban, who is about to begin the third year of an eight-year, $32 million contract (running through 2014), and has absolutely no buyout penalty for leaving at anytime, has been extended until the end of mankind.

Source: Margaret Soltan

I’m not clever enough. But the student journalists at Washington State University are.

UD thanks Dance for sending her this.

Yes. That’s it. Click on the word this. Click on it.

And enjoy.

Source: Margaret Soltan

Vanity Fair’s at it again.

Last month, an après le déluge article full of insider sniping about vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin appeared; this month, it’s an après le déluge article full of insider sniping about endowment fuckup Harvard.

McPalin fans can’t complain that VF’s a tool of liberal elites, singling out their girl for ridicule; even a glance at highlights from the Harvard article tells you that Cambridge — epicenter of the snooty left — is going to take a very big hit.

Some of this stuff you already know — I mean, if you read University Diaries you already know it — but the VF writer runs some blood through the numbers. Like frinstance you know about “the eight-figure salaries some of his managers were pulling down” — (That’s eight, as in thirty million dollars a year apiece … Count the zeroes… 30,000,000 … Non-profit work… Good for the conscience… And good for the pocketbook!… ) — but maybe you didn’t know about the personalities raging around the numbers:

The longtime head of Harvard Management Company, Jack Meyer, quit to start his own hedge fund in 2005 after growing fed up with criticism over the eight-figure salaries some of his managers were pulling down and with persistent meddling from top Harvard officials. Two particular annoyances were Summers, who had been questioning Meyer’s investment strategies, and Robert Rubin, a member of the Harvard Corporation, who frowned on Meyer’s aggressive strategies and wound up on the “warpath” with Meyer, as one person put it.

When Meyer left, he took much of Harvard Management Company with him — including 30 portfolio managers and traders, as well as the chief risk officer, chief operating officer, and chief technology officer. The place became “like a Ferrari without the engine,” according to a portfolio manager who arrived after Meyer left. This angered Rubin, according to someone who knows him well: “In Rubin’s opinion, Meyer crippled the institution.”

If only Summers and Rubin, with their I-know-better-than-you personalities, had let things alone! The managers would have been happy with their ever-increasing salaries (Keep in mind that they were graciously taking a cut from what they’d have gotten in the private sector, and Meyer would understandably have wanted to reward them with tens of millions more in pay every year.); one university in the United States would have gone from having the GDP of Bulgaria to, say, the GDP of … the United States? And that would have done wonders for school pride… We’re Number One!… And instead of Meyer deciding that the best thing he could do with this meddling issue was take down his entire operation and destroy a school, he’d still be sitting there, happy as a bug!

Here’s a snippet of sniping:

The Harvard endowment soared from $4.8 billion in 1990 to $36.9 billion as of June 30, 2008, and in the last half-decade or so, the men and women who run Harvard seemed to have convinced themselves that the university’s fund would grow at double-digit rates for, well, eternity. “Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years,” says Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1967.

Dershowitz himself, though, doesn’t know much about economizing. He hires far too many people to write his books for him.

Fact is, Harvard — as I’ve suggested on this blog before — is an all ’round out of control drunk. Money and power, you know.

As with the Palin fiasco, when things come crashing down in the sober light of day, Vanity Fair moves in, with its glossy photojournalism and pesky reporters.

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

UD thanks Tony.

Source: Margaret Soltan

… and using eternal vigilance against people on its faculty who criticize the drug industry and faculty conflict of interest related to it.

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed reports on the latest scandal out of this most pharmaloving campus:

Emory University has been accused repeatedly over the last year of looking the other way while one of its prominent physicians built extremely close ties to the pharmaceutical industry and — critics charge — failed to adequately report those ties as required by university and federal regulations.

But what if you are an Emory professor who happens to differ with the pharmaceutical industry? Then, it appears, Emory watches you closely — and if you are a blogger, the university can tell you that you must remove the Emory name from your Web site. That’s why a recent post on the J. Douglas Bremmer’s blog Before You Take That Pill is called “I Am Removing the Name of My University From This Blog.” Bremmer is professor of psychiatry and radiology at Emory and as his blog title suggests (as does his book with the same name), he is an avid critic of the pharmaceutical industry.

In the post, he notes that he was recently ordered to remove the Emory name both by the interim chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and by the medical school’s executive associate dean for faculty affairs. In the letters, which he provided to Inside Higher Ed, they tell Bremmer to remove Emory’s name, logo and letterhead from his blog because none of them can be used for “non-Emory business.” He was also told to report on when he had removed Emory from his blog.

The letters cite complaints that the university received about a blog post Bremmer made in January in which he criticized the eviction of a man with bipolar disorder who was being forced out of his apartment for smoking. Bremmer made his point in the form of a mock letter “To Whom It May Concern” giving his blessing for the man to continue to smoke. According to Bremmer’s Emory superiors, complaints they received suggested that he was making “clinical recommendations for a patient you do not know and have never examined,” and these postings made them feel the need to tell him to stop using the Emory name.

… Bremmer’s fans have noted with alarm his need to remove Emory’s name from the blog and they have been e-mailing about the situation, noting, for example, that Emory isn’t bothered by Charles Nemeroff, the professor at the center of the conflict of interest dispute, appearing with his Emory identification at events not related to the university (and sponsored by a pharmaceutical company) — but clamps down on a blogger who criticizes the industry.

… [The head of the AAUP] said that it was wrong and a violation of academic freedom for Emory to tell a faculty blogger not to use the university’s name in his identification or elsewhere on his blog.

“What they absolutely cannot do is say that he cannot identify himself as an Emory faculty member,” he said…

Ready, aim, FIRE?

Source: Margaret Soltan

From the Canadian Jewish News:

… In his keynote address [at a Yeshiva event in Montreal recently], [Richard] Joel, who has been YU president since 2003, made an appeal for greater financial support from Montrealers, as well as for them to send more of their children to YU.

He said the university spends about $2.5 to $3 million a year educating those Montrealers, but receives only about $750,000 to $850,000 in revenue in any given year from Montreal.

“The economy is awful, and we are operating in a major deficit,” he added.

Joel did not refer to the $14.5 million YU has said it lost in the fraud allegedly perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, who was a member of its board of trustees…

Source: Margaret Soltan

I found it here.

Source: Margaret Soltan

None of it’s easy to cover, believe me.  But the University of Hawaii is particularly tough, because everyone involved - except for some students and faculty - is just clueless.  Hawaii’s like watching water circle a drain forever.  No money.  Losers.  About to hit students up for more fees so the water in the drain can keep circling.  Full of happy talk about what an exciting time it is to be a Hawaii fan.

UH didn’t do anything wrong, by the way.  It was the rain. 

“[F]ootball attendance was dampened by rain at several home games,” explains the chancellor, who reiterates her total support for the program.

They’ve got close to a three million dollar deficit, which will “add to what independent auditors said earlier this year was $5.4 million in debt accumulated over the previous five years.”

What’s that look like boots on the ground?  A commenter describes “a baseball coach whose program has underachieved for eight years, with 70% of the stadium empty for most of [his] tenure… Then, we have a hoops coach, who has proved mediocre at best, leaving 60% of an on-campus arena … (in a market of 800K+ people with no NBA franchise…) empty.”

They’re in the last stages of a Thomas Hardy novel out there.  Everybody’s given up; they’ve dug too deep a hole. 

Or - sorry - evil crushing Fate, in the figure of that dampening rain, has dug too deep a hole.  Nothing to do but sit in it.

Source: Margaret Soltan

For Souter’s departure today, much reciting of poetry, all of it written by Robert Frost. In his farewell letter to his colleagues, Souter describes the joy of his work at the court as he and his fellow justices contended over “those things that matter to decent people in civil society.”

He quotes from Frost’s poem Two Tramps in Mud Time — a poem, he writes, that expresses “the ideal of the life engaged, ‘…where love and need are one…’ … That phrase accounts for the finest moments of my life on this court…”

The poem describes the poet and his love of chopping wood. He both needs the wood for his fires, and loves in itself the act of chopping the wood:

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

These are goods in themselves, the ideal here that of the human body deeply engaged, in zenlike self-transcendence, in an act. But beyond the engrossing physical pleasure of this natural movement lies something else:

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

The only really meaningful act has this double aspect of vocation — a job that must be done to satisfy a human need — and avocation — a playful gratuitous act of sheer joy. Iris Murdoch calls art “close dangerous play with unconscious forces.” It’s the same idea: Souter is evoking the serious play — often, indeed, at the court, with dangerous forces — that work as a justice has represented for him. Play for mortal stakes.

Source: Margaret Soltan