University Diaries

As we segue toward September, UD offers three cautionary tales about recent efforts on the part of American universities to go corporate.

Quietly the UCLA newspaper notes, a few days after it hit the Associated Press, the Harvey/Bystritsky story. Campus newspapers aren't set up to cover big breaking stories (do you follow Penn State events in the Daily Collegian?), so as this one develops (and it will develop), the Daily Bruin will be worth checking mainly for local comments and letters about a lawsuit against a UCLA professor and the UC Board of Regents that has the potential to be a very big story. Not, say, Anna Nicole Smith big, but big.

The storied criminal career of University of Georgia football rushes forward with the impetuosity of a naked boot leg play. Winner of the 2010 Fulmer Cup for the most arrested university team in America, Georgia refuses to rest on its laurels. Every recruitment year is an adventure in felony, each month a fresh rap sheet.

You want cynicism? You want clever, obscene, hilarious cynicism? James Joyce's Ulysses is a real gusher.

1.) Page 403. O, I so want to be a mother. We're in Nighttown, the late night hallucinogenic bad dreams part of Ulysses. Leopold Bloom, a cuckold, has struggled all day with his sense of his shaky masculinity, and now in this insanely desublimating setting he has been transfigured into a puling, mincing pregnant woman.

This is it, the whole thing, selected for you with care and love after many years of Ulysses reading, teaching, and writing. Memorize only a few of these sentences from Joyce's novel, and you will be ready for this year's festivities.

Dante doesn't get one. There's no Hemingway holiday, no Emily Dickinson Day. Do people all over the world, once a year, all at the same moment, gather to read Othello? No. No writer gets a whole day of the whole world reciting, performing, singing and celebrating his or her work. No writer except James Augustine (James Disgustin' to his detractors) Joyce.

"In five years, this will be a huge industry." Thomas Friedman is a little more sure of this than he should be. Indeed his column this morning is awfully close to advertising copy for Coursera and other MOOCs - like Udemy, the MOOC through which UD teaches her series of lectures on poetry. But it's now clear that American universities ought to pay attention to the rapidity with which this technology is turning not only into the mildly interactive worldwide sorts of lectures that UD offers, but a fully interactive, credentialed, even job-searching phenomenon.