gehringer_2

In all the years I've been connected to UM (which is a lot) the only UM pres who I saw force real transformation was Harold Shapiro. He came in and kicked a complacent institution in the rear and put it on the path to being world class. I think Schlissel - in his first few years, was pretty good also, but then he went off the rails.

So just to close the item I left hanging, I have now seen the Nolan Finley op-ed. Short version is the Dems Regents were unhappy with Ono since the election - felt his leadership was AWOL. They penned an OP-ED (which in the end was not run) which he felt was an insult and attack on him and wouldn't sign on. Supposedly he had wanted to stay at M but the relationship had simply collapsed.

against Tx, but not in Tx. but either way they have to travel Thursday night.

I put him an Amash in the same category. Nuts, but honestly nuts.

no doubt cost discipline is terrible, which is big shift from my undergrad days when people were still pretty cost conscious., but when you have 115K applications, 9000 applications just to the Law school, it's pretty clear the discipline isn't going to come from the customers!

👍

I get the point but I think Ono had lost the confidence of a lot more than the lunatic fringe. I tend to think the protest policy proposal was a big misstep - I mean the draft could have come from the Nixon White House. Which points to there being two different questions here - one is DEI and one is the larger question of civil society. DEI at UM needed to be fixed but that's one issue in a much larger context. And DEI may not have been the only issue at play if he had lost the Regents - it remains to be seen. In any case, you can't lead unless you give people a belief in where you are going - if what is dribbling out in the local papers is correct, Ono had lost his audience. So maybe he stays and tries to lead them to where he thinks a better place is? It is just as much capitulation to simply duck out? if you are going to turn an institution at all, I guess you have to be a little bit of a visionary and that is certainly not a vibe I ever got from Ono - or Schlissel for that matter. I think they were both more caretakers than movers. Maybe he was just the wrong guy in the wrong place once the political tide had turned. And so we wait to see what if anything leaks out from the Regents. Even if they weren't going to cry about DEI reforms they might applaud in private, he may have stepped on toes there if they ended up being blind sided finding out about the changes on twitter. To be honest, I think that had as much to do with Schlissel's dismissal as anything - him not paying adequate attention to the Regents that is. e.g. he might have survived the personal issues if he wasn't already in the dog house over ignoring/fumbling the Ilitch/Gilbert efforts to build more presence in Detroit.

which IIRC, wasn't even what it was once you panned back and saw the whole graphic.

the problem with this approach is that if you are wrong, by the time you realize it any hope of winning the battle will be over. I think the lesson if history is pretty clear that you oppose what is wrong when you have the chance. Granted, the issue is that the Uni's had gone over the edge on identity is destiny, but the Universities' transgressions are small potatoes to Trumps attempts destroy any civil society barriers to his whims. You can put your own house in better order without capitulating your obligation to provide institutional leadership. As the little girl says "Why not both?"

while they are at it they could do the same for the whole NBA.

If anyone at DOGE actually knew what they were doing, they could tell DJT that running a prison on an island is a very big waste of money - which is why it's not a prison anymore.

right - LaLoosh was good in spite of all the reasons he shouldn't have been,

So I only had access to a bit of the article, will track it down somewhere - but the crisis came when the Ono was asked to sign on to something (op-ed?) in opposition to something - no doubt some aspect of Trump policy, and he refused, which put him on the wrong side of the Dem regents and almost the entire University community.

article in the DetNews this AM makes it sound like there was a growing division inside the Regents about Ono's dismantling of the DEI program, which he apparently did without much consultation with the Regents. The Dem majority appears to have wanted the U to take a stronger leadership role in defense of academia against the Trump admin. Obviously hard to know what level any of this actually rose to. Also worth noting that the contract extension came before the election, which certainly changed the landscape out from where everyone expected. Maybe the Dems on the Regents have come to believe he wasn't the leader needed for a fight they now have on their hands. On the money side, the October deal was apparently about the best ever given to a public University Prez, second to the one given out by --- you guessed it - U Florida to Ben Sasse. That didn't end well - depending on whether you believe Sasse resigned by choice or not. Nolan Finley also has a take on what lead to Ono's departure but it's paywalled and I stopped contributing the DetNew's profitability a while ago.

aka Street clothes.

you look at how much vote totals have increased recently though and it is a different electorate. I buy the argument that making voting easier has increased the electorate - and I don't think that has played well for the dems. I don't think the Dems, who have for many decades been the party of the more engaged voter, have figured out how to reach the lower information, lower interest voter that has joined the electorate. This is why I think the Dems best hope is that Trump voter buyer's remorse simply shrinks the electorate in the next cycle as those people stay home realizing they were incompetent voters. If Dunning-Kruger holds the Dems will have a tougher go.

Obama did get a lot of votes in 08 - but on the other hand remember that Bush and the GOP had not only just blown the economy to smithereens with lax oversight (one case where you could say a president's admin was directly responsible for an economic outcome), but were also conducting wars that had become unpopular, plus his opposing candidate couldn't even decide if he was or wasn't in the race - so Obama had some very strong winds at his back. It *should* have been impossible for the GOP to win in 2008. And 2012 he got fewer votes - it was very competitive despite Obama's advantage of incumbency.

Maybe just the 'Costner effect'. A lot of his projects seem to be polarizing.

Michigan is a school that will be happy as a clam once the NCAA revenue settlement is in place. They really haven't had much reason to get themselves in trouble - not that that usually stops anyone who does.

exactly!

The thing I remember about it was that that that I had no sense of surprise that Americans boys in uni's would end up shooting other American kids with signs. We understood our society considered our lives to be disposable in that period no matter which 'side' we were on.

I haven't seen the DiNiro film but Paul Newman and Albert Salmi did a fine B&W production of BTDS way back in 1956 that I saw rebroadcast once - maybe late 60' or so. I've never seen it rebroadcast since. Don't know in particular about this one but a lot of stage dramas done as live TV specials back in the day were kinescoped (prior to video tape) and many have been lost.

If Keith has fixed himself, that's probably means the axe for Malloy, because to keep a productive Torkelson, Keith and Torres in the lineup together most nights means one of them will have DH tied down most nights. Malloy can play OF, but with Vierling back there will be even less reason to want him to.

Badly tired of fighting with the faculty is likely spot on

Field of Dreams is the odd duck though. It isn't really a sports movie. It's 'about' baseball's place in culture, but it's not directly about a baseball player or players or a team or playing baseball. The movie's protagonist is not a baseball player. Baseball is the framework for the movie's ruminations about a lot of other things to hang on. 'The Natural' was a beautiful film, well made in many ways but in the end I didn't thinnk the movie sold its plot premises as believable. Maybe they worked better in the book - which I didn't read. Or maybe Redford was just miscast. He certainly had the physical part - over which such a big deal was made at the time, but he's not the actor to make you believe in a character with the flaws of Roy Hobbes.