OTHELLO'S SEMANTICS OF BODY, MIND AND SOUL: AMERICA'S RACIST PRESIDENTS, DEVALUED HIGHER EDUCATION, AND DEBASED PRIESTHOOD. (2024)

Perhaps the greatest general semantic travesties, beyond the wholly ignored problems of the English language itself, concern the overlooked triple debilitations of physical, intellectual, and spiritual undertakings in American culture. To illustrate, we may well look into the ignominies of Donald Trump and other disoriented American presidents, the notoriously unprecedented, over-rewarded but under-performing "work" of college president Ronald Machtley, and the piously pretentious dissimulations of Cardinal Bernard Law. Perhaps the greatest public service of General Textual Semantics lies with how it can define and reproach these types of ignored institutional semantic transgressions of our American political, educational, and regional cultures. Indeed, the extent to which America has failed to fully confront the general semantics of its continuing institutional negligence has escaped proper attention. Accordingly, Shakespeare's Othello presents an anticipatory microcosm of our self-contradictory states of human affairs today. This most poignant and moving of all of Shakespeare's tragedies helps throw much-needed light upon the calamitous issues that have disabled and disgraced the institutional dispositions of American cultural experience--the economics of racism and slavery, the inexcusable breakdowns of American higher education, and the still-rampant pedophilia of the Roman Catholic Church. Relatedly, in Othello we witness how a distinguished human presence falls prey to a scheming, injurious intellect and how both betray a lovely, noble, inspiring human soul. These points of reference, of course, help to vivify the dynamic of the play--the all-consuming contention between vice and virtue as outlined, for example, in Bernard Spivack's definitive scholarly Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil--perhaps the most comprehensive and illuminating book ever written about any single Shakespearean play. (1) Spivack's focus, in its intellectual precision, directs attention to the rich literary tradition of Prudentius' Psychomachia, particularly the evolution of the Vice figure in European Christian culture. That figure, as it proceeds from medieval allegorical personification, manifesting most graphically in various Renaissance naturalistic representations, and modern literature, finds itself presented vividly in Shakespeare's villainous Iago. The "motiveless" Iago takes his place among co-destructive characters in what may stand as Shakespeare's most far-reaching play... a play that speaks to us today more than ever. Othello thus prefigures how violent racism, hypocritical intellectuality, and false spirituality function in surprisingly common ways as continuing general afflictions. Yet Spivack's thesis requires contemporary completion.

Othello as Symbolic Problem Drama

Critics have shifted focus away from the play's complicated orientation, shrinking it into a psychological playpen to dally with whatever pet behavioral theory suits them. The results cloud over the semantic (and seminal) auspices of Shakespearean symbolic drama in such plays as Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, (2) and other studies of allegory. (3) As we previously noted in Beowulf, the Creation and the monstrous debasem*nt of its Elements, constitute the long-disregarded semantic thematic foci of that poem, which carefully structures its motifs into various parts throughout its allegory. So too in Othello we observe the collapse of the integrating aspects of the human enterprise. Shakespeare's treatment of this (and our) disintegrating world projects its symbolic message in a prophetic allegory, which identifies our fractured human enterprise more completely than Spivack's original thesis--in body, mind, and soul. The prefigurative allegory in Othello defines and anticipates destructive conditions prevalent in America more than ever. As archetypal allegory it takes the resonant universe of Body, Mind, and Soul and gives them powerful local habitation in Othello, Iago, and Desdemona respectively. The motive power energizing these primary characters shapes each of them and the world around them. Othello's physical presence from start to finish delineates his frail stature as a racially despised leader who has emerged from slavery. The play, peppered with racist innuendo directly and indirectly, displays Othello's corporeal authority reigning provisionally as the hallmark feature of his fallible human nature subjugated to the afflictions of intellectual iniquity and shameless bigotry prevalent in the world. Iago, feeding off his hatred of Othello, can only use his intellect to plot against all, including himself, to the death. Desdemona carries forth the precarious purity of virtue as she shines beyond human capacity to understand and value her innocence too compromised in the frail world. Thus, each character segments the message of a philosophical allegory in which Body, Mind, and Soul live deadlocked by fate, trapped by their complicated destiny to exist with each other flawed as they do. Othello's defects involving his proprietary love, his slavish suspicion, and his weak distrust; Iago, a rabid sociopath, falls hard for his own intellectually restless dissimulation; and Desdemona, surprisingly secretive and weak even in her malleable ways, all fall victim to themselves as much as to the conniving agencies of Iago.

The Shames of America's Slave Economics

The triple allegory of Othello projects itself out historically to our times. Accordingly, ignoring its dubious heritage, America has evolved from a racist murderous state and a land of territorial and property thievery to a preponderantly unselfconscious criminal nation-state that has done little over time to adapt itself to humanistic postulates of belief and conduct. First of all, it established itself by overtaking the land, lives, and properties of indigenous populations that had for centuries sole ownership and control of long-held territories and peoples. Its subsequent shameless laws and decrees held America's ill-gotten goods and privileges firmly in place as semantically criminal self-misrepresentations. Our purported "democracy," "land of the free," "home of the brave," and "sweet land of liberty" amount to nothing more than self-persuasive self-serving political nonsense--an inconceivable semantic gap between "belief and practice. What we managed to do in North America we repeated throughout the African continent, with (again indigenous) people, selling them off in huge numbers and consigning them to forced, inhumane servitude as slaves. (The tragic rhythm, pace, and tone of American slavery, incidentally, finds itself captured in Louis Armstrong's brilliant "West End Blues"--America's ironically true national anthem.) According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million slaves found themselves shipped to the New World and 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage. (4) The 1860 U.S. Census shows four million slaves living in the South alone. As early as 1790, some 18% of the entire American population consisted of slaves. Three of the first four American presidents owned slaves, and the most aggrandizing of these, George Washington, owned about two hundred--he, of all people, the "Father of Our Country" as we have long taught our schoolchildren. In fact, quite a number of presidents since Washington can trace their lineage to slaveholders in the not-so-great American tradition.

The current American former president, Donald Trump, presents us with the moral nadir of America's executive office. How the American people took sufficient leave of their senses to put such a moral midget in the White House leaves millions of Americans dumbfounded and bewildered. Even worse, how they could continue doing so for 2024 simply boggles the mind. The litany of this man's wrongdoings would fill a tome thousands of pages more than this article... any article. He, as a corrupt business practitioner, has cheated and swindled his way through life. Trump, semi-treasonous, shamefully unpatriotic, exhibits boundless disrespect for the military, all government authority, especially America's system of justice. To say that he has brought shame upon all Americans stands as the understatement of the century. The man is intellectually and morally capacious. His standards of conduct, his ethical awareness, and his manner of righteous leadership all serve to degrade America. No words can describe the infamy and lawlessness of his seeking to topple our government, upend our system of free elections, and sequester highly confidential documents in his summer mansion. This crotch-crazed, insult-infested, debased, and lost soul of lost souls need not concern us any further in this part of this essay.

The Still-Neglected Consequences of Slavery

Perhaps the most compelling statistic, the total positive economic impact of American slavery, aside from Dr. Gates's work, has never revealed itself truthfully because America, in its perverted rationality, has always avoided reminding itself of the sad facts of its vast exploitations of Black peoples however decoratively we semantically dress those facts. To say that reparations for the descendants of the enslaved must go forward truly understates the issue. Also, the related problem of how we have exempted the North from the insidious evolution of American Slavery has only received recent attention. The New England states and New York have received virtually no serious historical, contextual thoughtfulness. Pre-Revolutionary Rhode Island and Massachusetts businesses and industries reaped huge profits off the black backs of their criminally enslaved human beings. The essential semantic problem here concerns how the absence or misnaming of truth represents the nature of truth in the "a-semantics' of falsely self-deluded American experience (Please see the ETC article "Hamlet Unread, Language Unwritten, America Lost, Earth Diminished" (2022)). Our studies have long surfaced as understated, flawed or impressionistic--incomplete at best. Even Professor Henry Gates accepts the puzzling estimate of Eltis's and Richardson's 388,000 people as the total number of slaves shipped to America between 1585 and 1866--an impossible number. Gates, like most American historians, over-focuses on the South, as if the institution of slavery originated there and proceeded from there. Scholarly nonsense. This refusal to come to terms over the years with the true impact of slavery economics in America stands as the single most neglected disgraceful semantic understanding of American inhumanity. The only worthwhile and important scholarly writing on the subject, aside from Dr. Gates's work, has come to light as recently as 2014 with the publication of Dr. Edward E. Baptist's important The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism and recently, Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, eds. Sven Berkhert and Seth Rockman (2017). Also, a valuable text just published--How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with History of Slavery in America, Clint Smith (2022). These latest, recent studies, all written surprisingly within our past decade, show for how long we have lost touch with what should have touched us in the 350 years previous. America, in the single century from 1860, emerged as the world's foremost economic power in large measure thanks to the (properly re-named) Industrial Revolution of Slave Labor. Cotton, of course, with its maddening and out of controlled world productions and demands, taking its place from the humble and humiliating cotton gin, played a major role in this explosion of world economies. Problematically, Slave Labor Economics has simply ignored establishing entirely honest labor costs and honest computations of long-deserved, overly due reparations, for Black America. We've tried to cloud over the unaddressed criminality behind America's wealth and prosperity with the self-congratulatory semantics of economic and political dishonesties. The problem of semantic distortion, whether evident in the confusions of Othello himself, or in the national misperceptions implicit in how America changed the constitutional agendas of national slavery, plainly shows us how readily we can transform one set of "truths" for another.

The Shames of America's Higher Education

Another monumental semantic misdirection, lost to our collective comprehension--education, especially higher education--has proven as debilitated and as faceless and as obscured as slave economics. The overall enterprise of education itself has diminished, on balance, as an evolving, abject but long underestimated failure. Always reserved for the few whether by race, economics, or politics, education now, having extended its franchise to the poor and unprivileged, undergoes new and unprecedented pressures that downgrade it further across the board. Social scientists estimate that up to 50% of all colleges and universities will close down for good within our preset generation. (5) A recent study published by Forbes reports that 55% of all U.S. college faculties either wish to resign or retire from their jobs. Currently, 47 states report already diminishing entering college classes everywhere. Another problem--the rapidly expanding market for internet education--has already accelerated the enrollment decline and has devalued the quality of education. The current advent of "ChatGPT" unprogressively replicates the substandard idiom of the English language, reproducing (as I have reported) the "dead verb" afflictions we have succumbed to for centuries. Students at all levels readily admit to their semi-illiterate "command" and lack of thinking, reading and writing skills. The ill-effects of computerization, little understood, threaten the integrity of American education everywhere. Relatedly, the rankings of pre-professionally educated Americans have declined markedly: 14th in science; and 17th in reading (Programme for International Student Assessment) thanks to educational advances of students from China, Japan, Russia, and other nations advancing in education. The U.S. no longer leads in standardized testing: As of 2008, for instance, it ranked 25th in mathematics. Worse yet, in 2015-2018, the U.S. slipped to 24th in science, 17th in reading, and further, to a horrific 38th (of 71 countries) in mathematics. China in 2018 (no surprise) ranked 1st in all three categories with scores well ahead of all other countries.

The Sad Legacy of Mr. Machtley

American higher education has gotten so expensive that it destabilizes America's economy. The gross college student loan debt, for example, has soared to $175,700,450,800 as of January 21, 2023. Most sensible Americans believe it will stay with us forever despite recent Biden overtures. In just the past decade, the cost of a college education has increased threefold--well above all other college expense categories. The fastest-growing out-of-control area of expenses: excessive administrative salaries and costs. Rampant (and undetected) increases in this area have grown colossal. Administrative salaries and costs have actually far outdistanced faculty and other instructional expenses--an unprecedented situation. One case symbolizes the financial degradation of American Higher Education: Recently, according to AAUP data, the highest paid college president in the United States in history--Mr. Ronald F. Machtley, a former Republican congressman from Newport, RI) and retired president of Bryant University--netted an annual salary of $6,280,000 (an annual sum greater than that of his college's entire faculty and 20 times more than that of the average American college president). As the highest paid college president in American history, for 24 years he managed to accomplish unsurprisingly and, documentably, little. His richly undeserved compensation has attracted no praise from anyone outside the Bryant campus. For good reason. Under his "leadership" Bryant has declined in endowment, quality of education, quality of teaching, properly managed faculty salaries, institutional reputation, long-range planning, curricular design and expansion, realistic "plant" upgradings, excessive spending, and a newly minted but fast-failing, very expensive Division One sports program. Machtley, despite his false claims otherwise, also unhappily turned Bryant into an open enrollment school. According to CollegeNiche, a student has a 99% chance of admission into Bryant. Bryant's yield ratio, the lowest in Rhode Island at 13.05 represents one of the worst in America, which itself averages a far superior 38.11. In comparison, Babson's yield sits at 36.09 and Bentley's 17.96. Further, the "Best College" 2023 "Niche" ranks: Babson at A+, Bentley at A, and Bryant last at B+. The "Raptor" New England Top 25 ranks Babson 11th, Bentley 22nd, and Bryant nowhere. Bryant's present incoming 2026 class of new students totals around 671 (many of whom hold Division One athletic scholarships)--its lowest incoming freshman class in years. Bryant, unlike most schools, has not yet publicized its class of 2027 entering data as of middle June 2023. Most colleges show greater freshman numbers. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and common sense can readily observe that Bryant no longer favorably compares with any quality institution of higher learning in America. Niche also rates Babson the 15th best American business school, Bentley 48th, and Bryant 79th. Also, incredibly, according to the AAUP, Machtley's faculty were among the highest paid in America, and, sadly rated eighth among America's worst 25 teaching faculties (calculated from over one million student surveys). (See Rate My Professor.com, which evaluates over 1.7 million American professors). Bryant faculty are also ranked sixth from the top on a tally of "the most ridiculously overpaid professors" (from over 600 colleges polled)--by CBS citing the Center for College Affordability. (6) Unfortunately, Bryant's faculty, like Machtley, enjoy excessive salaries for doing poorly regarded work at Bryant--the only institution of any kind in both unfavorable polls. In the category of "best colleges in Rhode Island," Bryant finished eighth among the state's nine institutions (student reviews.com. schools/rankings). Bryant, obviously, has lost major ground under Machtley. How poorly has Bryant performed? Although Bryant has lost status in endowment management, professorial ratings, overcompensated faculty, and division one athletic competition, in the crucial area of institutional appeal Bryant also ranks last. In what was once its competitive network (top four listed below). Bryant manages even there to find itself at its usual bottom rung:

College Applicants Accepted (%) Yield Ratio EnrollmentBoston College 39,842 7,587 (19) 43% 3,262Babson College 7,607 2,242 (22.35) 36% 656Bentley U 9,311 5,675 (61) 18% 1,019Providence College 11,478 5,509 (48) 20% 1,118Univ Massachusetts 42,540 27,877 (65.5) 17.5% 18,259U R I 25,105 19,198 (76.5) 17.4% 3,340Fairfield U 12,674 7,073 (55.8) 17.8% 2,256Holy Cross 6,498 2,786 (43) 32.4% 904Roger Williams 8,133 6,643 (81.6) 14.3% 1,163Stonehill 7,109 2,423 (72) 29.9% 725Clark University 8,151 3,904 (47.99) 13.01% 507Sacred Heart U 11,748 7,515 (60.5) 23.5% 681Bryant University 6,985 5,518 (79) 13.0% 671

Bryant does not consistently present admission figures, which in any case have diminished totals thanks to its Division One outlays (not just confined to athletic scholarships). Bryant's 2023 freshman welcome site as of July 3, 2023, shows only 407 registered. Current national data indicates 58% of all students receive athlete-scholar grants averaging over $5,000 per student. In the categories outlined above, Bryant has clearly fallen behind--an ominous situation. The above schools, and many others, all behind Bryant in most categories a few years ago, now surpass Bryant in all categories. The cases of Stonehill and Roger Williams particularly seem distressing since they, though long "average," outdraw Bryant, have better acceptances, have higher yields and enrollments, as do others. The only school to compare with Bryant--Quinnipiac--shows major signs of weakened financial resources, a lower yield ratio (10%), and high acceptance rate (88%). All the above twelve schools surpass Bryant, as do most other remaining once-competitive institutions in New England.

The Shames of Mr. Machtley

The measurement of college leadership--endowment management--stands as the most critical standard of a higher institution's all-around health. Under the far more able previous presidential leadership of Dr. William T. O'Hara, Bryant's endowment surpassed those of its competitors Bentley, Babson, and all others from 1976 to 1996 in every single year Dr. O'Hara and his immediate successors served. The university in 1996, at the time of O'Hara's concluding impact as President, Bryant ranked 209th in America with an endowment well in advance of Babson's and Bentley's. Subsequently, Machtley's Bryant soon found itself falling to 239th place with $150 million in 2000 and falling further to 287th place with $175 million in 2007. Ranked a losing 337rd at $153 million in 2013, Bryant, still falling to 340th at a still-disappointing $170 million in 2015 trailed Bentley (at 269th place) by some $200 million and Babson (at 222nd place) by 300 million. Even area colleges such as the proprietary cooking school Johnson & Wales ($264M), Providence College ($209M), Stonehill College ($189M), many others, well behind Bryant in 1996, now find themselves well ahead of Bryant less than 19 years later--a shocking reversal. The most shocking disparity: According to Money Magazine's Best Business Colleges in America 2022, Babson ranks 13th, Bentley 24th, and Bryant 222nd. Among best business schools, Babson and Bentley rank first and second respectively.

In 1996 Bryant's endowment surpassed that of every college in its competitive network. Machtley, however, in 20 years (1996-2016) destroyed Bryant's once-solid endowment. Ludicrously, on the Bryant Wikipedia site over his subheading "The Machtley Era" (sic. "Error") the following blatantly dishonest, widespread and absurdly calculated statement appears: "The Bryant University endowment in 2007 totaled $171 million, a net increase of $169 million in just 10 years." Similarly, on its website Bryant.edu/admissions, Bryant claims 9,000 applicants followed by a 68% admissions rate--a dishonest 61% acceptance rate--no doubt a contrivance designed to appeal to potential students. In fact, all over the internet Bryant broadcasts its false 9,000 figure for 2026. Had Machtley stayed the O'Hara course (instead of sailing off to dispose of Bryant's funds), Bryant should easily have had an endowment in excess of $500,000,000. He even ungraciously failed to acknowledge Dr. O'Hara's superb accomplishments. And of course, he ignored his own failures. According to the NACUBO's official 2020 statistics, Babson ranked 197th with $488 million, Bentley in 1991 had $359 million, and Bryant ranked a dismal 340th, plodded along with only $183 million. It took Bryant thirteen Machtley years to grow a miserable, unimpressive $13 million. Babson has since pulled miles away from Bryant--by a half-billion dollars--with a 2022 figure of $792 million. According to Data USA, Bryant ended 2020 with a 182 million dollar (falling) endowment in a year when the average college endowment increased by 41%. We find, from 1996 to 2016 (Machtley's first 20 years), that in the following NACUBO listing every school from some 120 regional colleges listed had a rate of growth in 1996 below or well below Bryant's endowment. (7)

Institution 1996 2016 Percentage Amount Amount IncreaseHarvard U $8.812B $34.542B 291.99%Idaho U $60.6M $237.5M 291.9%Berklee $80M $313.4M 291.8%UNC-Greensboro $60M $235M 291.7%St. Mary's (TX) $44.3M $168.8M 284%Boston U $433M $1.663B 283.44%Johnson & Wales $36.8M $238.9M 278.7%Rowan $45.8M $173.2M 278.2%Brown U $789M $2.963B 275.5%Brandeis $235M $866.8M 268.85%Monmouth $26.6M $98M 268.4Seton Hall $68.5M $242.6M 254.4%Boston College $587M $2.064B 251.6%Wayne St. $86.4M $301.5M 248.9%Drake $55.98M $192.2M 243.2%Bradley $72.96M $271.65M 242.3%Scranton $49.1M $165M 236.7%St. Mary's (ND) $48.3M $160.6M 232.5%Kenyon $64.3M $208.9M 224.9%Cornell $1.829B $5.75B 214.76%Connecticut College $87M $273M 213.8%Barnard $92.1M $286.8M 211.5%Ball State $58.9M $182.4M 209.8%Western NewEngland $23M $71M 208.7%Ohio Wesleyan $65M $203.1M 213.0%Holy Cross $226M $681M 201.3%Kalamazoo $68.8M $206.7M 200.4%Stonehill $60M $179M 198.3%Wellesley $606M $1.784B 194.39%Teachers Columbia U $92.9M $265.8M 185.8%Lawrence U $100.4M $283.5M 182.4%Lewis & Clark $75.1M $212.M 182.7%Randolfe-Mac $80.3M $219.3M 173.1%Centre $97.79M $264.8M 170.7%Bentley U $90M $242M 168.9%WPI $163M $435.8M 167.4%Youngstown $86.M $223.4M 159.8%St. Michael's $35.8M $91.3M 155%Northeastern $273.7M $693M 152.9%Valpariso $81.1M $204.1M 151.7%Mt. Holyoke $266M $668M 151.1%Alaska $114.6M $285.2M 148.9%Middlebury $408M $571M 112.8%Claremont $80.4M $168.7M 109.8%Simmons $104M $183.2M 76.0%Ithaca $116M $267.4M 130.5%Clarkson $77.3M $177.1M 129.2%Wesley an $372M $838M 125.3%Loyola (MD) $86.9M $192.8M 121.97%Bates $114M $251M 120.2%Wheaton $78M $185M 137.2%Allegheny $77.0M $181.6M 135.9%Smith $578M $163M 181.49%Bryant (1996-2016) $98M $158.6M 62.2%Bryant (1996-2020) $98M $183.8M 81.6%

Unfortunately, Bryant disgracefully ranked solidly last in this large field of schools--a position in which Bryant should never have found itself. Notably, all schools in bold print (76) trailed Bryant in 1996, but incredibly rank ahead of Bryant in 2016. Of course, no college or university has fared better than Bryant in these 20 years--an incredible situation. Relatedly, Machtley has loaded up the internet with his own "Big Lie." Bryant's Wikipedia site (en.wikipedia.org) begins brashly, once again, proclaiming "The University's endowment in 2007 totals 171 million, a net increase of 169 million in just 10 years." The actual increase was only 10 million. This falsehood is contradicted officially by NACUBO itself (the National Association of College and University Business Officers), which accurately reports Bryant's 1997-2017 figures in 10 years to $126,119 (thanks to Mr. Machtley). Machtley also credits himself for building Bryant's beautiful library--a complete lie. Clearly, Bryant has been asleep at the wheel. (8)

Bryant stands no chance of developing its sports programs into a fully competitive Division One athletic platform. Bryant at presently hosts twenty-five (25) Division One sports and thirteen (13) intramural sports programs. The NCAA has 340 schools but only 24 of them (all big conference schools) generate enough revenue to offset the costs of their athletics. The Chronicle of Higher Education actually reported that only six universities completely cover the costs of their sports programs. In two decades, Bryant has fared poorly in Division One competition. It has too hastily and mindlessly rushed into D1 status, and in the process has diminished its academic stature, focus, and value. It continues to gobble up its budgets with aimless, senseless expenditures--an expensive NFL-like strength training center; a perpetually empty building with much discarded space used as an inspirational worship center dedicated to Machtley; a completely revamped indoor athletic facility; an "Innovation" center but little more than a glorified study hall; a newly still-rebuilding stadium; a very costly D1 athletics program; a poorly planned public arena; and its overall pathetic effort to lift itself out of a declining position in higher education.

The greatest debacle in the Bryant saga concerns Machtley's engineering of Bryant's oversized board of trustees. They total some 34 "officers," mostly alumni (26), appointed by Machtley, which explains how he got his excessive payout approved from a seven-member executive board. Bryant's trustees owe the public an honest appraisal of why they have rewarded Machtley so out of line with reality. On the subject of his own academics, Machtley does not have any presidential academic credentials or experience. He has no advanced academic degree, no professional college teaching experience, no scholarship and publications, and no standing in any community of scholars, and no reputation whatsoever as a distinguished educator. Yet he commands a much larger paycheck than any other American college president in history... beyond ridiculousness. A student "rating" for Machtley observed "This guy has no awareness of problems on campus. He chooses to say "There is no problem" when the bathrooms are moldy and crumbling, the grand majority of freshmen are being forced into triples, and there is no parking. He paid millions for the marble interfaith center, which he dedicated to himself as he chooses not to improve the campus" (Rate My Professor.com.).

In honest perspective, the contextual semantics of presenting one set of "truths" while actually performing another lies at the weakening status of such American higher education. Overall, one measures the worth of a college president like Machtley as follows:

(1) Financially: His ability to protect the institution's endowment. Machtley failed most miserably in this regard. He should have at least positioned Bryant near Babson and Bentley--both at present 100s of millions of dollars past Bryant. Bryant has likely the poorest endowment performances in America.

(2) Reputationally: Bryant clearly has fallen off in its appeal. Its applications have fallen; its acceptances have fallen; its student yields have gone down, reaching the lowest point in its region of nearly 200 schools. Bryant now accepts most students who apply; under Dr. O'Hara in 1995 its acceptance rate stood at 40%.

(3) Its higher-education position: Bryant has lost its once-stellar identity. Where it used to admit nearly a thousand freshman students, Bryant for 2020-2021 shows an entering class of only 617 students. Its class of 2017 Facebook page shows an enrolled membership of only 403.

(4) Machtley's quixotic romp into Division One sports has proven a documentable, verifiable disaster. In fifteen NCAA Division one year, his men's basketball team against quality D1 programs has 1 win and 59 defeats. Football, if one can imagine it, has even fared worse: Bryant has not even taken the field against one quality program.

(5) Machtley's lack of intellectual and academic leadership shows up as poor in his development of faculty. First, one must wonder how Bryant managed to get itself among the top group of the USA's "worst professors" list AND at the top of a list identifying "the most ridiculously overpaid professors in America"--the only college in America so disgraced.

(6) Relatedly, Bryant's China program has brought over a good number of faculty who teach in disciplines other than business or liberal arts. The cohort has helped diminish Bryant's weak affirmative action effort; proven itself too expensive; has done little to present itself as an exchange program; and is politically problematic-for openers.

(7) Programmatically, Machtley in his 24 years at Bryant, has not advanced one major academic program in business or liberal arts; whereas Dr. O'Hara in much less administrative time than Machtley innovated three solid still-active business majors for Bryant: Actuarial Mathematics, Business Communications, and Systems Management. Machtley: nothing of note. O'Hara's Dean of Faculty recruited over 45 long-and-still serving professors in less than 10 years.

(8) Bryant has represented itself dishonestly, as repeatedly shown above. The poor management and waste of precious resources that colleges and universities like Bryant can ill afford threatens to downgrade permanently what once constituted one of America's greatest and proudest strengths. This pretense of degradation--acting one way while behaving in another fashion--the modus operandi of Iago in Othello--constitutes precisely the Machtley administrative semantic malpractice. The truly shocking thing about the above example: Bryant's transition from a prosperous, effectively run institution to a much lesser institution has happened so swiftly--a semantic malpractice far more serious than one might assume of any institution in American higher education. Words such as "scholarship, "academic innovation," "leadership," "endowment," and "quality" have no honest semantic presence at Bryant University. In fairness Machtley should return his overpaid salary to fund a scholarship for needy students who could not enroll at Bryant--the William T. O'Hara Scholarship Fund." His kind of example has only hurt America's higher education's future.

(9) Under Machtley, Bryant has lost its once-stellar identity. Applicants now find Bryant listed among schools little-known, endowment poor, geographically remote, academically weak, and much more. Gone are the days when Bryant truly competed against the likes of Babson, Bentley, Providence College, Holy Cross, and other comparably fine institutions.

(10) Bryant has expanded its plant thoughtlessly, senselessly, even insanely by building such edifices as an NFL quality-strength training center, a Machtleyan self-dedicated worship center, a costly unacademic research center, an over-aggressive expansion programs to support its unrealistic Division One efforts, an unneeded presidential mansion, among other things.

(11) The Bryant quality of student life has deteriorated dramatically. Long identified among America's "most drunken" campuses, Bryant now ranks as the second "druggiest" campus in the entire United States (See Golocal prov.com). It stands near the top (60th) of the thousand plus "most Liberal" American colleges. The goLocal website warns parents of Bryant's risks to their children's well beings.

(12) Bryant's minority support program leaves much to be desired. 107 students of 3255 versus Babson's 104 of 2457 and Bentley's 160 of 4008. Against America's 12.6% overall in 2016, this dismal record is even worsened by the fact that Bryant has recruited many of its black students from Division One athletic scholarships.

(13) It goes without saying that Machtley's greatest "contribution" to Bryant consists of his appointments of the gaggle of buffoons, lackeys, incompetents, figureheads, and flunkies who've gladly helped him mismanage Bryant notoriously. At no point of his 24 years of disservice have his "trustees" taken an intelligent, articulate position on any issue of serious note before Bryant. Their rewarding him with a huge highest-in-American-history overpayment represents nothing more than a blatant cover-up of Machtley's unparalleled ineptitude--probably, the worst of any college president in America. And they have let him build structures of no academic value as identified above. As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, Bryant's trustees should explain why they overpaid Machtley so ridiculously. Also, they, with Machtley, should explain why and how Bryant's endowment spiraled down as it did during Machtley's tenure (1996-2016).

(14) Bryant's last-year's weak entering freshman class (2021-2022) at 671 is a cover-up for the dismal figures now prevailing. Virtually all colleges except Bryant have announced their complete fall 2023 numbers. Bryant's 671 students include fully paid Division One scholarship students--a large number--hiding the truth.

Our Father Who Art Not on Earth: The Shame of "Mysterium Iniquitatis"

No doubt contemporary religious belief and practice have received much of its tonal character from the culture of Roman Catholicism. Things, unfortunately, in that respect like American Slavery and American Higher Education, have taken a further semantic turn downhill. Perhaps the most shameful semantic malfeasances involves the still-rampant pedophilia of the Roman Catholic priesthood. The extent of the semantic evils (its true semantics forever shrouded by a host of factors) perhaps will never find the truth. Many tens of thousands of Roman Catholic clergy found themselves arrested and convicted, suspended, forced into retirement or safe seclusion, even posthumously criminally charged (as in the unsolitary case of Christopher J. Weldon, Bishop of the Archdioceses of Springfield, Massachusetts), murdered while in prison, excommunicated, and above all--shielded and protected by superiors such as bishops, cardinals and popes, This massive, world-wide cover-up and its aftermath now maintain themselves as fixtures in human consciousness. If the accepted figure of 6% applies, then we have some 25,000 priests under suspicion. Ever since Walter V. Robinson's Betrayed: The Crisis in the Catholic Church and the movie Spotlight both of which tell the story of how The Boston Globe in January of 2002 began a series of articles investigating sexual criminality in the Boston Archdiocese undertaken by priests, the Globe has printed over 900 reports and articles and consequently has drawn attention in the nation's newspapers to countless thousands of columns of print about this utterly wretched subject. What existed for many years in a culture of silence transformed into a concatenation of shocked responses, opinions, judgments, disbeliefs, and consternations... for openers. Though the overwhelming volume of instances of priestly perfidy had a never-ending quantity, astonishment has still ensued about the Catholic hierarchy's efforts to conceal, downplay, shrug off, or dispute with legal threats of all kinds, the treacheries abounding. The Boston Globe deserves special credit for its good work.

Some Persisting Diabolic and Shameful Details

In Robinson's footnoting report entitled "Shining the Globe's Spotlight on the Catholic Church" subtitled "The Globe's Coverage Isn't Over Yet," in Harvard's Nieman Reports (Spring, 2003), the reader learns that prior to the story's breakout, "there was nary a file folder on a priest, much less a bishop or a cardinal" in the paper's warehouses of public disservice documents. Despite the avalanches of publicity given to the sordid accounts of sexually criminal priests and their superiors, and the various legal efforts made by the Globe and its sympathizers, the full and truthful story remains far from full disclosure.... this in the twentieth year anniversary of Robinson's article. Even a casual walk through the internet pages on "Pedophile Priests" reveals a stunning variety of stories about clerical abuse all over the world. In just one website we find a French account of how 200,000 children fell victim to thousands of priests--this in a recent www.newsweek.com item dated 10/15/21. In another shocking recent website dated 11/12/19 we learn "Almost 1,700 priests and clergy accused of sex abuse are unsupervised." (www.nbcnews.com) Unfortunately, many years back a neglected 1985 report directed to the annual meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops estimated that American bishops should plan to be sued for US $1 billion and up to US $10 billion over the following decades." https://theconversation.com Hence, most people who know the "true" story would readily acknowledge that the iceberg barely sticks out from under the freezing water. On the internet in American state after state we continue to read of very large numbers of Catholic priests who have committed sexual abuse. The heinous problem, unfortunately, refuses to begin to go away.

Many people would disagree with the fact that the church has dealt with the issue of clergy sexual abuse conscientiously. And no blame whatsoever can we attribute to the Globe, which has honored its responsibility to its publics. For one thing, priests like John Geogan whose lurid story kicked off the movie Spotlight (who was brutally murdered in prison by a fellow inmate who claimed himself to have been a victim of abuse still do not receive the notoriety due them... not by a long shot.) Geogan, depraved beyond any sound or sense, sexually victimized some 200 young boys. Aside from selecting children whom he knew had already lived compromised lives--in poverty, emotionally starved in broken families, in a household flattered to host visiting priests--one feature of Geogan's atrocious M.O. involved actually leading his victims in prayer while conducting his sordid business. He also employed other enticement tactics. While no doubt Geogan's ways of dealing with children, his life and that of the thousands of others like him certainly deserve further biographical documentation. The only account of priestly predators one may find on the internet, for example, would be a website listing brief itemizations of factual information ("parish assigned...," etc.) that glosses over sordid details. How a human being institutionally invested with holy authority and power could bring on such diabolic conduct goes well beyond right reason and moral sense... and, of course, moral accountability.

Aside from the need to single out more priestly perverts, public humiliation in the form of holding a mirror up to their unnatural conduct might further serve to prevent as well as to punish. Take the matter of the already-mentioned Bishop of Springfield--Christopher J. Weldon--who served nearly three decades as a highly esteemed religious leader and considered a builder of churches, religious houses, schools, and hospitals. Weldon in his practice of pedophilia threatened his victims with beatings and even did so on occasion. Weldon even stood suspected of protecting one Father Lavigne, accused of murdering one of his young victims. Having a special commission finding him post-mortem guilty, Weldon remains, exhumed by the Diocese from their place under a magnificent cemetery monument, found themselves unceremoniously redeposited in an unmarked grave. No doubt during his tenure as Bishop (He even served 10 years as the president of Our Lady of the Elms College.) numerous pedophile priests felt encouraged to do their dastardly deeds. Although the Springfield Diocese has added numerous more priests to its original list of some 50, Atty. Michael Garabedian, the well-known and respected advocate for numerous victims, reported that Springfield has greatly understated its numbers clearly and obviously, to Martin Baron, Editor in Chief of the newspaper, who pushed hard to get the story told truthfully--going well beyond his call of duty. Baron himself advanced the accusations against Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who had done much to cover up the criminality of priests by transferring them from parish to parish all of which led to his long-overdue resignation. Indeed, field editor Robinson himself, as the story began to take final shape, realized that he had failed to follow the story after a defense attorney sent him years before a list of offending priests whose victims the Diocese had paid off. The attorney, a Mr. Eric MacLeish, hounded meanwhile by Robinson to come up with names of pedophiles, learned from MacLeish, of all things, that he had years before given Robinson a list of offending priests, which Robinson sadly let go. Robinson admitted his failing to investigate--a fact not lost in the movie version of the story. He apparently also did not even remember what he had done with MacLeish's information. Like Bryant's Machtley, Robinson gave himself credit for the Globe's expose. In the 20 years since the Globe ran its series on sexually criminal priests, not one well-researched serious book on the subject, except for Robinson's summary text, nor one scholarly study from the halls of academe, has come forth in public--and nothing of note from the Globe itself One exception: Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea's and Virginia Golner's Predatory Priests and Silenced Victims: The Sexual Abuse Crisis and the Catholic Church (2016), which puts the strongest "spotlight" yet on this terrible extremely complicated problem still very much with us. In fact, moreover, no reliable documented information exists about the total number of priest predators worldwide and the total amount of institutional losses suffered by the Roman Catholic Church. O'Dea and Gollner edit seventeen essays that focus more on theories of causation and definition rather than extensiveness and impact. Perhaps we wish not to know. The best we can do is a dated, inaccurate, incomplete summation in a Wikipedia website, surmising among other inaccuracies, that over $3 billion dollars have been paid out by 2021 to priests' victims. The full scope of the issue still exists in reality as an unresearched and undocumented matter of public concern: In sinfulness and criminality the Roman Catholic Church lies at its lowest nadir in history with the sword of Jehovah hanging over it. Despite websites such as BishopAccountability.Org, which lists monthly totals since the early 2000s of many instances of priestly pedophilia, we still lack so much knowledge and insight into an issue that but barely has taken its rightful place in the American collective consciousness. Another site offering victims help--recoveryspeaking.com--founded in Ontario, Canada on March of 2019, specifically addresses the consequential lives of priests' victims, a long-neglected major media subject. Since 2003 Abuse Tracker has become a haven of conformations about pedophile priests as an informative site that publishes the names of dioceses and religious orders (hundreds of these) appears on the internet. Nevertheless, we do not yet have the appropriate semantic handle of this profoundly complicated problem in our culture. How can one define the semantic evil implicit in a priest's directing a child in prayer while he at the same instance abuses?

This kind of prevailing semantic malpractice, neglect, and indifference typifies all three segments of the subject matter of this essay--the unacknowledged long-lasting consequences of slave economics, degenerated higher education, and still-misinformed and misunderstood widespread church criminality. Othello serves as the perfect metaphor of these most unfortunate realities. What we choose to forget should not stay unremembered--too many long-buried stories still remain ignored. We still need a much larger, brighter "spotlight"--than any that we've had thus far--to light up America's darkest places. This horrific form of semantic replication in its evolving re-formations deserves far more recognition and justice than we have given it. The virtues of general textual semantics stand clear and just.

As in Othello we bear semantic witness to the "dark" places that we have let racial hatred take us; the sad places we have let our degenerating educational system take us; and the base uses we have let "God's chosen" take us in the name of religion. In sum, the most distressing national semantic cover-ups and nondisclosures involve so-called "presidents" ranging from over-venerated slave master Washington to white racist whor*master Trump; higher education's master swindlers like Machtley, and those self-entitled unindicted criminal "religious" such as Cardinal Bernard Law and Bishop Christopher Weldon. These represent the notoriously bloated "leaders" at their best and the semantic damages they've done at their worst. Their words live far from their acts and deeds. Enough said... for now, while we can only hope for better as we survive the likes of them... and their semantic transgressions. I suspect we barely know the buried and hidden malfeasances of these but barely exposed subjects.

Notes

(1.) Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (Columbia University Press, 1958).

(2.) Stanley J. Kozikowski, "Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra" 5.2 (1977), 309-311; The Allegory of Love and Fortune: The Lottery in The Merchant of Venice," 32 (1980). Renaissance (1980), 105-115; "Literary Applications of General Textual Semantics: New Sources and Understandings of Hamlet" ETC: A Review of General Semantics 76.1-2 (2019). These studies illustrate how characters embody the goddess Fortuna and how Hamlet acts in the lineaments of his father's ghost--all instances of what I'd call "abstract naturalism."

(3.) The following studies present highly stylized and carefully wrought conceptions of allegory specific in nature but different in orientation from that of this essay. One, however, rings true: J. A. Bryant, Jr., "Shakespeare's Allegory: The Winter's Tale", The Sewanee Review, 63.2 (1955): Bryant's essay, concerning Thomistic allegory, says it well: "Allegory is the center of all we know or can ever know as human beings--the meaning of history, the pattern of right action, and the reflection of truth..." (209); Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, "Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice'" PMLA (1962); "Jeremy Tambling, Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare" (Rodopi, 2004); Anthony David Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's "The Tempest and the Logic of Allegorical Expressions" (New Haven, 1967, 2007); Antoinette Dauber, "Allegory and Irony in Othello," 40 (2007); Kriste Iiev, "FalstafFs Gluttony, Lust, Avarice, Sloth, and Pride," South East European Review 16.2 (2010).

(4.) Henry Louis Gates Jr., The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. https.www.pbs.org.net/African-Americans.

(5.) Since 2009, 1360 colleges and universities, including some 80 four-year institutions, have suffered declines in first year enrollments. (The Hechinger Report: "Colleges in Crisis.")

(6.) Bryant's reputation, accordingly, now suffers immensely. It stands as the only academic institution in America to find itself listed as nearly top-ranked on both the internet's "worst college teachers" website (www.cbsnews.com) and its "most ridiculously overpaid professors" website (www.dailycaller.com) citing an American Association of University Professors survey. Only 25 institutions appear on the first list, and only nine on the second. Bryant stands as the only one named on both infamous lists.

(7.) Even the lowly cooking school Johnson & Wales rises from $238.9 to $278.7. Bottom of the Barrel: Bryant's 159M at 62.2% (see below):

Institution 1996 2016 Percentage Amount Amount IncreasesSt. John's U $57.2M $643.4M 1,025%Arizona State $54.97M $612.6M 1,014.4%Oklahoma State $78.4M $847M 980.4%NJIT $9.5M $98M 931.6%American U $71M $576.9M 812.5%UMass $84.5M $768M 808.9%Arizona U $92.1M $754.7M 719.8%Memphis U $24.7M $192.7M 702.9%Lesley U $21.6M $172.7M 699.5%Fairfield U $40M $310M 675%LeMoyne $20.8M (1997) $157.6M 657.7%Redlands U $40.2M $302.8M (2014) 651.4%Cal Poly $26.9M $190.3M 607.4%FSU $84.7M $589.5M 590.4%E Carolina $24.9M $166.7M 569.5%UConn $57M $377.2M 561.8%Villanova U $87.4M $551M 530.4%Denver $81.2M $607.4M 526.14%Quinnipiac $62.7M $388M 518.8%New School $59.4M $322.5M 442.7%Tufts U $289.7M $1.563B 439.5%MIT $2.476B $13.182B 432.39%Florida Atl U $36.6M $194.8M 432.2%Stetson $76.8M (2014) $408.2M 431.5%Fordham U $136.3M $721M (2017) 429%Yale $4.853B $25.409B 423.57%UNH $64.7M $336M 419.3%Rollins U $65.2M $337.4M 417.5%St. Olaf $86.4M $446.2M 416.4%Suffolk U $39M $199M 410.3%Lycoming $36.3M $183.4M 405.2%Muhlenberg $48.9M $246.97M 404.84%Miss State U $88.7M $444.5M 401.2%Amherst $413.6M $2.032B 391.3%DePaul $86.2M $420M 387.1%Bowdoin $276.5M $1.34B 384.6%St. Mary's (CA) $34.8M $165M 374.1%U Hartford $34M $146M 370.9%Suffolk U $38.6M $181.6M 370.5%W Mich U $54.9M $246.97M 349.1%UMaine $40.5M $179.9M 344.2%Williams Coll $510M $2.256B 342.35%Colby $162.3M $710.7M 337.9%Clark U $87M $372M 327.6%Baldwin-Wall $68M $290.7 (2013) 327.5%Assumption $22M $94M 327.3%Babson $81M $345M 325.9%Prov Coll $51M $213M 317.6%Dartmouth $1.082B $4.474B 313.49%URI $30M $124M 313.3%Skidmore $80.417M $326.9M 306.55%

(8.) Bryant made an extremely unwise choice to venture into Division One sports. For one thing, it debased itself. It now had to compete against low-level NCAA schools--"no-name" schools--like those Bryant newly joined in the America East conference--with low endowments and low academic reputations and low recognition factors. Instead of identifying itself in conferences with higher quality institutions like Bentley, Brown, Harvard, Boston College, Providence College, Holy Cross, Babson, and URI, Bryant clearly locked itself into a poor competitive position, which has already hurt its reputation and enrollment. Most of Bryant's new competition includes schools little known, poorly managed, having low endowments, and in need of Bryant more than the opposite to bolster enrollments. In twenty-four years, Bryant football has yet to play one quality Division One school. The same holds true for its very little exposed Dl basketball program amassing its record of 1 win and 59 losses. More importantly, Bryant now competes against schools it has nothing in common with. And it shows, sadly. (In lacrosse, a marginal D1 sport, Bryant has had highly qualified success against mostly regional D1 teams: W27, L43.) This situation will worsen as the impending D1 shake-up begins to take place.

Stan Kozikowski, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, Bryant University, has spent most of his writing and teaching years at Bryant and previously at Elms College. He has published numerous studies in English and American literatures. He has written as well over a dozen articles on general textual semantics for... ETC. He has also served as Bryant's Dean of Faculty. Stan dedicates this essay, as he does all his work, with affection to Eunice, his beloved wife and partner of 58 years.