Hot. There’s a small breeze, but it’s Washington and it’s September and that means muggy. The early evening sky is beautiful. A mix of blue and gray with white clouds – it’s been a day unable to decide whether to rain, and the sky remains mixed.
UD is sitting on the edge of the Pentagon Memorial, from which there’s a large view of the gravel, the grasses, the white-flower crepe myrtles, and the winged benches jutting out of the gravel. Constant low-flying jets out of Reagan buzz the plaza. One of them was crashed just here.
I sat for ten minutes on Leslie Whittington’s bench – Whittington, her husband, and her two children, all killed. All of their names engraved on the bench.
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Tears? Oh yes. Didn’t know her, but feel a kinship. My age, also professor in Washington. I feel compelled, on these anniversaries, to imagine her last minutes.
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Enormous American flags hang off the sides of the Pentagon and nearby office buildings. The evening sun lights everything up with great clarity and drama. People set flowers down on each bench. A simple gesture which feels immensely loving.
Of course I’m never adequate to these moments. People go to a lot of trouble to design and build memorials, but when you get there it’s hard to know what to do, where to walk. There are quite a few people here with me, and we drift from winged bench to winged bench, reading names, photographing bouquets…
I’m now in a corner crouching over my laptop…
I find myself thinking not of the dead but of the living… Specifically, of two students I chatted with today after class. One after my English literature seminar and the other after The Postmodern Novel. One is a sophomore, one a senior.
The sophomore is talented in many directions and loves the study of many things, and this enviable condition was lately causing him anxiety. As in: What precisely to do? His parents were artsy sorts who did poorly in life and regret their artsiness; their son has inherited both a love and a suspicion of art. He figures he should probably be a music major (piano, other instruments, theory) but what can he do with that?
I tell him that a lot of people with those degrees teach. He listens. “What if I trap myself? Here I’m told to take advantage of all my skills and interests, but what if that’s actually a dumb thing to do?” I laugh and tell him that the impulse to map out your life, a preoccupation with not making mistakes, is understandable but to my mind a mistake in itself. “Life is messy, unpredictable. Probably the best thing to do is relax and pursue what you love. GW gave you some major, whopping, scholarships: Enjoy the gift.”
The senior amused me with a description of her honors seminar on the subject of love. “By the end of the semester, I’ll have learned never to get near it.”
Have I said often enough on this blog how much UD adores many of her students? Their charm, their energy, their considered and considerable puzzlement. It maketh my heart go pit-a-pat.
UD’s just like Leopold Bloom leaving the cemetery after Paddy Dignam’s burial. Throughout the funeral and burial his mind circles all the morbid themes; exiting the gates of the cemetery he’s right back onto Molly and Milly and all.
I can’t be very much with the memorialized; I grant them parts of my mind and soul on anniversaries, but even there the business of being busily alive intrudes.
… at 1776 G Street where I grab a salad before meeting my English lit class. The bikes were part of today’s 9/11 Ride.
After classes, UD plans to visit the Pentagon Memorial, a good place for reflection despite the big urban setting. It’s been a couple of years since she visited the Memorial; she will blog about how it looks now.
So UD‘s nodding off to yet another article about the beyond-belief-lucrative degeneracy of American football, when she lit on the sentence in this post’s headline. Which reminded her of one of her blog’s most consistent themes: The professionalization of revenue sports at our universities has put more and more of our students at risk from the dangerously violent players universities routinely recruit. Nebraska got to deal with Richie Incognito, about whom it still boasts; and of course the lovely University of Florida program got Hernandez:
Since Hernandez’s arrest for first-degree murder, [then Florida coach Urban] Meyer has been under heavy scrutiny for allegedly allowing Hernandez to engage in inappropriate acts while a member of the Gators football program. Gainesville Police reports indicate Hernandez was questioned in a shooting investigation in 2007 where a witness described a suspect meeting his general description. Hernandez was also reportedly involved in a 2007 bar brawl where he broke a bouncer’s eardrum, and allegedly failed multiple drug tests. A Sporting News report indicated that Meyer shielded the press from learning of one drug-related suspension by having Hernandez wear a walking boot and fake an injury.
Here’s UD‘s take on the highly compensated monsters of professional American football: Americans love the monsters’ violence, on and off the field. The world’s most violent sport is by far this country’s most popular. And we’re making our players more violent by the day. Okay.
But college. You know? College? Colleges are importing pumped up nutbags on their way to the NFL.
The American university president makes $400,000 a year intoning about the sacred duty to keep our students safe; his football coach makes four million dollars a year doing everything but going down on Richie and Aaron to get them to come to campus.
UD has made the point on this blog before: Universities need to be very skeptical of high-powered job candidates who come at them with absolutely incredible accomplishments. Rather than start hyperventilating and begging the candidate to tell them what the school can do to make them join its faculty, search committees need to calm down, take a deep breath, and ask whether they’ve got a liar on their hands. Not just the sort of mild liar who plumps up his cv a bit here and there, but a plagiarist, a research-faker, a degree-inventor, and – ultimately, as West Virginia University has recently learned, a very scary person.
When a faculty member at WVU began examining the credentials of the school’s chair of epidemiology (the chair was being considered for an honor called the “Chair of Excellence”), he quickly discovered that virtually everything on Anoop Shankar’s cv was made up. As the university launched an investigation, Shankar made the sociopath’s characteristic mistake: overdoing. Sociopaths tend to overdo their resume claims; and, when cornered, like Shankar, they tend to overdo their efforts to destroy their would-be destroyers. Shankar sent two Indian friends to talk to the professor – Ian Rockett – who outed Shankar. This is what his friends reported happened when they did so, with one of the friends entering his office and the other waiting in the hallway.
“You Indians have nice brown skin,” Rockett allegedly said [to them]. “But you smell weird with the spices that you use for cooking.”
Right about then the grey-haired professor supposedly pulled his chair closer and snatched at the young man’s penis.
Teppala claimed that from the hallway, he could then hear Rockett rise from his chair and say loudly to Ganesan, “Here, taste my white c–k.”
Ganesan said he fled rather than reciprocate and that Rockett flew into a rage, his words echoing into the corridor: “I will destroy you!”
Ahem. When scripting these scenarios (one of the friends later confessed that Shankar had written and directed this drama), you need to be selective. Minimalism is more plausible than maximalism to most audiences. Deciding to throw in not merely an ethnic slur, but sexual harassment, and not merely sexual harassment but sexual assault, and not merely sexual assault but violent threat of retaliation, is just the sort of excess you’d expect from a sociopath.
[T]here are no grounds for the sweeping pronouncements about the virtues of non-Ivy students (“more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive”) that [William] Deresiewicz prestidigitates out of thin air. It’s these schools, after all, that are famous for their jocks, stoners, Bluto Blutarskys, gut-course-hunters, term-paper-downloaders, and majors in such intellectually challenging fields as communications, marketing, and sports management.
Of course, he’s talking about professional football players. You don’t see this in our colleges.
Here they are. UD comments on each one.
The writer starts with a new building at Yale, and there’s a reason he starts with this project. It’s the best. By far. Most of the others are quite bad, but the Edward P. Evans Hall, with its soft light ‘fifties modernism footprint is simply a pretty, non-jarring, non-aggressive addition to the campus.
Like a lot of contemporary buildings, its interior is so insanely open and abstract that things like privacy and the human specific seem totally absent. And while UD herself might not be keen on the tendency away from autonomy and individuality, she acknowledges that – especially in a business building – an architect has to reflect the digitized groupworld of the people who inhabit the construction. Evans Hall’s walls feature massive childish Sol LeWitt wall art, reflecting the thin bright bold everything-supersized world of postmodern hedgies (Yale has plenty of gothic architecture and brooding squinting portraiture for its humanities division).
Lee Hall at Clemson (AD’s #8), for its school of architecture, is also excellent. It mirrors the mini-Dulles-Airport, modestly soaring, white-sail-like, radically open floor plan, all-windows, exteriorized technology (see the Pompidou Center) thing the Yale building’s doing – and it does all of this well. And #9, the Reid Building, is equally fine, in the same almost-all-white, radically open, large masses luminescently lit way as Lee and Evans (a critic of the building notes that “Doors are in notably short supply, the whole interior presenting a Piranesi-like fluidity.”). You could argue that Reid is out of keeping with the bricky gloom of its Scottish street, but there’s nothing wrong with having a lighthouse to perk things up.
Eh, okay, so that’s the good stuff. The bad buildings all have stuff in common, just as the good buildings do. Mainly the bad stuff features pointless gigantic dead abstraction (see #4, which clearly has no context at all – I don’t see anything around it – and therefore randomly sprouts, a dying mushroom and a red oxygen canister trying to pump life back into it via an obscure connecting unit); yet more abstract gigantism plus deadly overhangs (#2; #7); desperate chaotic wedging in (#3); overhangs, gigantic abstraction, and dramatic Spiderman-like pointless design features (#5); and, finally, runty off-kilter deconstructed blah with overhangs (#6).
It’s so much easier to whore yourself when you’re a think tank than when you’re a university. Think tanks don’t really have any of the public accountability universities do. Washington think tanks are increasingly set up to make money by prostituting their intellectual work to paying foreign governments. Pressure is building for some of them to do the decent thing and register as foreign agents.
“It is particularly egregious because with a law firm or lobbying firm, you expect them to be an advocate,” [says one observer]. “Think tanks have this patina of academic neutrality and objectivity, and that is being compromised.”
UD ain’t sayin’ some professors at some universities (some departments at universities) don’t get away sometimes with whoring themselves to corporations and governments. This blog couldn’t stay in business without global pharma having its way on a semi-regular basis with some universities, and without econ professors issuing custom-built papers the real estate industry, for instance, pays them to write… She is saying that, as in the recent dual but failed assault on the university’s virtue by rich Jonnie Williams and handsome Governor Vaginal Probe, American universities tend to do a pretty good job of defending ye olde patina.
Think tanks? Meh.
You have to understand how much that shut-out cost EMU. To do that, you have to revisit the following University Diaries posts:
1. The post pointing out that “virtually no one shows up to watch” games which cost EMU millions to put on.
2. The post pointing out that
NCAA rules stipulate a school must average 15,000 fans per home football game to remain in Division I. Eastern Michigan, which averaged 6,401 fans per home game in 2010, uses $150,000 from a distribution contract with Pepsi to purchase tickets from itself at a rate of $3 apiece to remain NCAA compliant.
3. The post quoting an EMU finance professor saying
“We’re down to 57 percent regular faculty, and the other 43 percent are lecturers and part time. Searches are being held back, and I’m unhappy that they spend so much money on athletics and not academics. It’s important that we have full time faculty…Over the last few years, the budget for academics was cut by four million dollars. They need new programming. They redid the football stadium before they redid the academic buildings. … The football coach makes more than the president.”
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UD calls football the freak show that ate the American university.
At EMU, you can actually watch the process of digestion.
UD, à ce moment-là, sits drying off on her bed after a Rock Creek Trail walk that ended just as a big summer thunderstorm came up.
The walk was fine, but the big nature news today was UD‘s encounter with an Eastern American Toad as she watered her front garden (who knew she didn’t need to water?). It plopped out from a rock UD was watering around and then hunched absolutely motionless on her gray driveway. A lesser toad hand might have assumed it was a clod of mud or a piece of dog waste, but UD knew from her time with Elphaba (a toad who, years ago, took up residence on UD‘s front stoop and ate all her bugs) that this was a toad for sure. UD lifted the water hose and sprinkled the toad, which immediately hopped into UD‘s pachysandra lawn and disappeared.
… it’s worth asking a question often posed when a professor dangerously implodes: Why didn’t anyone who knew or worked with him say or do anything? Did someone do something? If so, why was Pitts running a high-profile program at American University up to the moment of his arrest?
As in this sad recent case at Yale, the culminating implosion in the Pitts case was indeed a culmination, and it’s hard to believe no one at AU was remotely aware that Pitts might be a danger to himself and others. (Yale had put Samuel See on unpaid leave.) As his pyromania and drug theft spree around the Washington region (he is now being investigated for the fires at the Marriott Hotel during the APSA convention, which he attended) comes to an end with his arrest, and as interviewed AU students say the obvious (they’re scared that this man was until a few days ago teaching at their school), attention inevitably turns toward American University and its policies.
It is of course possible that Pitts was able to hide from everyone on campus what looks to have been a massive drug addiction and a perilously deteriorating mental state; but assuming some people noted disturbing behavior in him, the question is: What ought they to have done? UD is fully aware that when it comes to possibly unhinged people around you – especially people in positions of authority – your response typically has everything to do with denial and with vaguely hoping that someone else will say or do something.
The most frightening recent campus case of this syndrome involved Professor Amy Bishop, the mass murderer at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Quite a few people there report having been seriously creeped out by this woman (she turned out to have another murder, plus an attempted bombing, in her past), but no one seems to have tried to have her put on leave or whatever. They did indeed deny her tenure, but she decided to kill as many colleagues as she could before leaving.
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David Pitts has been busy, in the last few days, in UD‘s neighborhoods, trying to burn down buildings full of people. If suspicions are correct, he began with a hotel building housing a large number of his fellow political scientists from all over the world. He then seems to have moved to a shopping mall steps from AU’s campus. One assumes he would eventually have gotten around to torching AU itself.
… and this certainly looks like another one – just down the street from UD.
The chair of the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University has been arrested for breaking into a shopping mall and setting a fire there.
David Pitts was apparently found with “matches, lighters, gloves, a newspaper and black liquid substance. Plus, there was evidence of a small fire still visible.”
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UPDATE:
WHOA. Read some of his recent tweets.
This one in particular: August 29, from the Marriott Hotel, where all the people there for the annual American Political Science Association convention had to evacuate because of a fire.
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More details of Pitts’ arrest here.
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Could there be a link between the fire at the Washington Marriott that Pitts reports on via tweets – Pitts reports from the scene and seems to have attended the convention- and this more recent local fire?
And that’s because our universities – bless their hearts – are unlikely to want to waste their time studying bullshit substances even if the state the universities are in makes it clear it’s willing to throw a lot of money at the universities to do so.
So Governor Vaginal Probe and the Missus have been found guilty of corruption (the maker of the bs substance threw money at them in order to get them to get the universities to produce studies of the substance in order to give it respectability so people would buy it…) and will go to prison in part because they were too stupid to realize that rank and total intellectual corruption is something almost no university (in the States; they should have tried the scheme in Italy) is going to approve.
