Ralph Lauren’s richness of an España that is long gone these days was le look du jour in New York.

There is something organized and memorable about the last day of fashion week. Despite the grueling pace, late nights, early mornings and simply divine personalities we endure, there is an orderly sense of energy at the Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein Collection shows. Publicists are graceful and polite, photo check-in is straightforward, seating disasters are delicately avoided and celebs are accessible, or, if not, polite about it.

Such was the case yesterday morning in West Soho when Mr. Lauren held his 80th runway presentation. His front row of stars dressed in his premium line included Jessica Alba, Olivia Wilde and most of the members of the Ralph Lauren Royal Family.

For spring 2013, Mr. Lauren progressed from something South American to ornate looks that were undeniably Catalan and Castilian, with tomato suede jackets, amethyst silk marocaine trousers, cotton ruffle shirting in white and beautiful scarlet dresses. There were black calf woven totes and hats. The styling seemed a bit overwrought, but the majority of this overload was eliminated when the evening wear flowed in.

Incredible brocade and beaded boleros influenced by los toreros of Spain, black double-faced wool jackets and dresses, a stunning, full-length beaded tulle skirt, and scarlet dresses with embroidery and beading. It was wearable and eternally elegant.

Once we had caught our breath from all that beauty, The Observer beelined it to U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte.

“You’ve been to quite a lot of fashion shows and events this week, what are some of your highlights?” The Observer wanted to know.

“You know what? This right here. I love dressing in Ralph Lauren. It’s just amazing, it fits perfect,” replied Mr. Lochte.

Yes, yes we all love a wardrobe chock full of Ralph Lauren, Mr. Lochte, we’re wearing some ourselves for god's sake! Nevertheless, Mr. Lochte refused to move off-script despite our uninterested posture and facial expresses.

Connor Dwyer and Ryan Lochte

“No other better way to end fashion week with this show,” he continued in his monotone jock voice.

Moving on, we asked the decorated Olympic swimmer if he planned to carry the party on to London, Milan or Paris. He commented that his favorite event was the Us Weekly party.

“Have you got the Fashion Week fever?” we asked. " Will you be going to shows in Paris?"

“You know what? If they asked me to, I’d be more than happy to. I’m getting back into the water next week to train.”

“How has your life changed or your daily regimen after the stardom?” The Observer questioned.

“No it really hasn’t, ’cuz I always have time to find the swimming and workout and change. Nothing has really changed except going to shows all the time,” he huffed, as if it were a chore.

“What would you change about Fashion Week?” we wanted to know, catering to his runway fatigue.

“That there are so many opportunities to see great designers that you can’t really go to everything. You really have to pick and choose.”

Mr. Lochte's all-American sizzle and brawny physique, while a brilliant match for the Ralph Lauren brand, didn’t quite light our fire. Drowning in his pool of mundanity, we elected to approach someone a bit more engaging; we headed toward Vogue’s André Leon Talley, who lingered long after Anna Wintour, Grace Codington, Hamish Bowles, etc. had slithered for the exit of Skylight Studios.

“You looked entranced during the show; what’s so intriguing about him still, even after all these years?” we asked.

“He is a master! This was a tour de force. This show was a virtuoso tour de force,” proclaimed the extravagant editor, replete in his muumuu and couture platinum/gold chain necklace with hanging bone horn. “You can take Spain and you can absolutely sink the theme. The theme never sunk into a disaster because of the details and the workmanship."

Jackpot! Mr. Lochte had sunk our ship, but ATL was keeping us afloat!

“The attitude was modern, but the romance was Spain. But just a hint of it.

Team Vogue, with Mr. Leon Talley on the far left.

"Mr. Lauren is not saying you have to go out of the house in a dress like that. But he’s saying you have to [have a] dash of romanticism in your wardrobe. You have to have that new shoe that looks so marvelous with raffia. Or you just might want to have that perfect double-breasted suit in white.”

Mr. Leon Talley spoke the truth about Mr. Lauren’s heightened excellence in design, construction and materials. “For me it was a couture show. It was like an haute couture show in New York, which is rare.”

Truth be told, we’ll trust ATL for the Fashion Week critique and commentary and keep Mr. Lochte safely at bay underwater.

The currency, which has more than 20 users, was designed by some 30-something residents of this sun-seared town as a homemade response to Spain's crushing youth unemployment crisis. Users essentially start off with a revolving credit line, able to take on up to 100 pumas in debt. They earn money by selling goods or providing services to other users, tracking their balances in account booklets along the way.

Nor was the puma the only upstart:

Last month, promoters of a host of local currency projects got together to discuss the challenging environment at a conference in the town of Vilanova i la Geltru. In what seemed like some funky financial bazaar, the mostly youthful participants were flashing bills or ledgers from fledgling currencies with names like the zoquito, the gita, the minuto and the BilboDiru.

Some of the currencies were convertible to the euro, but one was pegged to the price of a cup of coffee. Some imposed penalties—a 2% loss of value—if users hung onto the currency for more than a few months. The idea is to force people to spend.

This is not a new phenomenon—hundreds of local currencies emerged during Argentina's economic crisis of the 1990s, The Journal notes. And it is perhaps less splashy than recent Bloombergian efforts to sex up the Spanish sovereign debt crisis. But it's enough to serve as our daily reminder that beyond the seemingly endless cycle of rising borrowing costs, rescue deals and austerity programs, people are struggling.

And that no intrepid reporter has yet turned up the bathtub ouzo trend piece for which we're thirsting.

What's that have to do with prostitutes?

Let's go back to the enfeebled Spanish banks, the ones that made those now-soured loans. Last month, the Spanish government nationalized Bankia, the nation's third-largest lender and the result of a 2010 merger of seven so-called cajas, or savings banks. Traditionally, the cajas distributed a share of their profits to social and cultural programs, a source of funding that's would prove all the more useful as government spending tightens. If only said funding was still there. From Bloomberg:

The collapse in social spending by the former Bankia savings banks will be felt in Torrejon de Ardoz, a suburban Madrid town, where the Alzheimer’s support group that Rodelgo helps run relied on donations such as a 6,000-euro grant in 2010 to equip patients’ homes with handrails, said Rodelgo.

Our Lady of Montserrat Foundation, which runs a senior citizens home for 97 people, will also be hurt. The foundation had relied for years on Caja Madrid to fund repairs and therapy programs, Director Mari Cruz Hidalgo said in a phone interview.

Caja Madrid has also contributed since 2002 to Medecins du Monde, which runs a fleet of mini-buses providing medical attention to prostitutes, said Guillermo Algar, a spokesman for the group. The organization distributed 210,187 condoms in 2011, according to a statement on its website.

Which, on the bright side, economic stimulus by higher birth rate, right?

(Alexandra Dean Hitzler)

The crowd held its breath, holding sweaty drinks beneath burnished brow. Why were we braving the excruciating heat of a crowded rooftop? To witness the Castellers de Villafranca del Pendès’s attempted construction of New York’s first-ever castell, or human tower.

600 arms and legs twisted and turned their way into an eight-tier addition to the rooftop deck (on the 20th floor), a deck reinforced with steel beams and two layers of plywood to support the weight of the performance. The team’s performance, high atop 230 Fifth, was a way to introduce New York to the Catalonian region of Spain’s 300 year-old tradition.

“The performance originally started as a musical performance at a religious festival,” Ram Devineni, a producer and director of a documentary about the team called The Human Tower, told The Observer. “A bunch of people started to get together and jump on each other’s shoulders, and after a certain amount of time the towers just got higher and higher. They really loved what they were doing so they decided to change it from a music festival to sort of a tower festival.”

Mr. Devineni said his idea to create a documentary about human-tower building came about after coming across the human towers on YouTube.

“We filmed this team traveling all over the world, building towers and spreading the gospel and the philosophy of tower building,” Mr. Devineni said.

Mr. Devineni said the documentary has been released around the world and there will be a private screening of the documentary on Friday, June 22 at Goldcrest Studios in the West Village. The goal of those involved in the documentary is to get the film broadcasted on television in the near future. Having been deemed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, we figure these soaring Spaniards might have something here.

The team will continue to hold performances in New York until June 24 at venues throughout the city, including two performances at Central Park and Battery Park on June 21 for the Make Music NY Festival.

Spain agreed to an independent audit of its financial system as the nation's government seeks to head off concerns that bank bailouts are pushing public finances to the brink of collapse.

Failure to form a governing coalition could prompt a second round of elections in Greece.

The leftist Syriza party reiterated to European officials that it believes the debt deal signed by the previous Greek government is invalid.

Chesapeake Energy faces $1.4 billion in previously unreported liabilities.

David Weber, the SEC's new assistant inspector general for investigations, was placed on leave and banned from entering agency HQ after telling c0lleagues that he wanted to carry a concealed firearm into the office.

Reports surfaced earlier this week that SEC had ordered an independent investigation into complaints of sexual harassment in its inspector general's office.

The Facebook IPO is already oversubscribed, according to Reuters. The offering is generating weaker-than-expected demand, according to Bloomberg.

Yahoo! chief Scott Thompson told top executives that he never submitted a resume or inaccurate information about his background to the company, raising the question of how the inaccuracy wound up in SEC filings.

Morgan Stanley asked hedge fund run by former co-president Zoe Cruz to return funds last month, ahead of Ms. Cruz announcing yesterday that she would close the fund.

Former Lazard CEO William Loomis is back in an advisory role, UBS hired Peter Riccile as global c0-head of real estate, leisure and lodging investment banking and Societe General was said to hire Francis Repka as its CEO for Brazil.

Greenlight Capital founder David Einhorn won the seventh annual Hillel Texas Hold 'Em tournament, helping to raise $500,000 to promote Jewish engagement on college campuses.

Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece's Syriza coalition

Europe reckoned with Greek elections and the Spanish government took a controlling stake in the country's third-largest lender. Phil Falcone kept cool at a hedge fund conference, despite turmoil facing LightSquared. Green Mountain founder Robert Stiller talked about the sale of company stock that led to his ouster as chairman. That and more, in this morning's Wall Street roundup.

Europe simmers: European governments held back a part of rescue funds promised to Greece after weekend elections raised the specter that the country's new governing coalition might shred an existing bailout agreement. As in, literally. With the Greek government unformed, and leftist Syriza coalition talking tough, the Journal reports that German and Finnish made a stink before agreeing to release $5.5 billion in bailout funds.

Spain said it would take over Bankia SA yesterday, converting $5.8 billion in preferred equity into voting shares, good enough to control a 45 percent stake in the nation's third-largest lender. The country's banking system is looking more and more like an Ireland-sized catastrophe, according to Bloomberg: While the government has ordered banks to post additional capital to cover losses on construction and property loans, the prescribed collateral-raise would leave nothing in the tank for trillions more in home loans and corporate debt.

Calm before: Storm clouds may gather over Phil Falcone, but when Dealbook went to see the Harbinger Capital founder speak at the SALT conference in Vegas, the hedge fund manager was the epitome of calm, or at least, he spoke thoughtfully and in mellifluous tones. On the other hand, no one asked about LightSquared.

Bad documents: The Florida Supreme Court will hear arguments today in a case that could undo hundreds of thousands of foreclosures, as the court decides whether banks that used fraudulent paperwork to file foreclosures can dismiss the suits and refile with new documents. Reuters has the story of how a 35-year-old drywall hanger initiated the case, and potential implications in Florida and across the country.

Stiller spills: Robert Stiller told his side of the story to the Wall Street Journal. The Green Mountain founder was stripped of his role as company chairman after selling $123 million in stock last week in a margin call as Green Mountain's share price plummeted following the release of second-quarter results. Stiller, often described as the richest man in Vermont, wore sweaters to work, practiced yoga...and took out hundreds of millions of dollars in loans for charitable donations and real estate transactions, including a $17.5 million Time Warner Center apartment previously owned by Tom Brady. "Lavish is relative," Stiller told the Journal.

When, not if: The FDIC will announce its M.O. for the next crisis that brings a financial institution to its knees: Regulators will seize the parent company and allow units to operate; Shareholders will be wiped out and bond owners would likely suffer losses as their holdings are swapped for equity in a new entity.

Expense account: Wendy's offered the president of its international division a lump sum payment of $850,000 if he moves to the company's new headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, and stays for at least two yeas, Footnoted reports. Word of that payment, buried in the supporting exhibits of the company's quarterly report, comes after Wendy's paid millions of dollars in severance costs when its CEO opted to resign over moving from Atlanta to Dublin last year.

Kryptonite: Facebook updated its S-1 to explain that growth in active users is outpacing the number of ad delivered, and it's all about mobile.

[Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP]

Scissor season: Moody's is expected to begin cutting ratings on banks any day now, and Bloomberg notes the consequences: Higher funding costs, curbed lending and another thorn in the side of economic growth. According to a Moody's note last month, Italian lenders are first on the chopping block, to be followed by banks in other European countries. U.S. banks will also come in for potential downgrades, but are unlikely to see ratings changes until June.

Banks in trouble: Spain is likely to require lenders to post an additional $45 billion in collateral against loans to the construction sector, Reuters reports, raising the likelihood of another injection of public cash. The Spanish government is expected to announce new demands after a cabinet meeting on Friday.

Meanwhile, Spanish banks are pushing their debt and equity on retail customers as larger investors pull back. The Journal worries that a vicious circle may be emerging: Fearing that losses would spook individual investors, banks have put off recognizing losses, exacerbating the tenuous position of Spanish banks, and the eventual reckoning for mom and pop.

Margin-roasted: Robert Stiller was relieved of his position as Green Mountain Coffee Roasters chairman after he sold 5 million shares in the company, worth $125.5 million, in a margin call. Green Mountain's stock lost nearly half its value last week after the company reported disappointing earnings and amid calls by short sellers such as Greenlight Capital's David Einhorn, and Deutsche Bank forced Mr. Stiller to sell shares to satisfy loans secured against his Green Mountain holdings.

BofA meets: The great unwashed are expected to descend on Charlotte, North Carolina today to protest Bank of America's annual meeting, though it may be a toss-up as to whether the protestors bear the lender the most ill will. Other candidates: Recently jettisoned employees, refi applicants, holders of the company's basement-dwelling stock. In case you were worried, city officials passed an ordinance in January prohibiting items "ranging from backpacks to crowbars" at large events. Hecklers interrupted a Bank of America presentation at the Citi Financial Services conference in New York in March, chanting "bust up Bank of America before it busts up America," and at least 24 protestors were arrested at Wells Fargo's annual meeting in San Francisco last month.

Americans not wanted: Wealth managers around the world are closing the door on American clients as the start date for rules to prevent tax evasion approaches. Beginning next year, foreign financial institutions must report information about income and interest accrued to the accounts of U.S. clients, raising compliance costs and limiting the options of Americans living abroad, according to Bloomberg. The IRS is holding a May 15 hearing, which could soften the implementation of the rules.

Tech banker: Michael Grimes, the banker who managed LinkedIn, Zynga and Groupon IPOs, spent years laying the ground work for Morgan Stanley's lead role in the Facebook offering, and made his career winning over Silicon Valley with a more flexible approach to investment banking.

Red tape: And it still takes a long time to refinance a mortgage.

[Stan Honda/AFP]

A clown.

A word of warning: if you are frightened by clowns, do not—I repeat, do not—see The Last Circus, a madcap, macabre fable from Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia, who has been compared to Guillermo del Toro but who, in this film at least, seems to be channeling some horror fanboy hybrid of Fellini and Almodóvar. Highly stylized and brutally dramatic, The Last Circus, which premiered last year at the Venice Film Festival, can be stunning, captivating and frightening—that is, until it loses its mind halfway through and becomes a bizarre and nightmarish telenovela.

In 1937, a circus is stormed by soldiers recruiting men to fight in the Spanish Civil War. A clown (Santiago Segura) is taken against his will, as his young son tearfully clings to him. He’s given a weapon and sent into battle in full costume (“A clown with a machete? You’ll scare the shit out of them!” his commander reasons), a role he takes to with surprising gusto. But after gutting an entire battalion, he’s captured by the rebels, and when they win the war he’s held in prison indefinitely. His now-teenage son, Javier, visits him. “Your lot in life is to play the sad clown,” father tells son. Soon after, Javier sneaks into the mine where his father is forced to labor, attempts to blow it up, attacks a colonel and watches his dad get trampled to death by a horse.

Fast-forward to 1973. Javier (taking the portly, somber adult form of Carlos Areces) is literally playing the sad clown, auditioning for a kooky circus troupe straight out of 8½. The “happy” clown, Sergio (Antonio de la Torre), is a sneering, abusive, alcoholic menace who tells Javier that he became a clown because, if he hadn’t, “I’d be a murderer.” Sergio enjoys telling dead-baby jokes and beating the daylights out of his beautiful girlfriend, Natalia (Carolina Bang), who also happens to be the troupe’s trapeze artist—and the new object of Javier’s affections, despite warnings from his fellow performers. At first Javier just wants to befriend Natalia, but, seemingly desperate to escape Sergio’s violent outbursts, she seduces him. It’s only a matter of time before Sergio comes around, and as soon as he does The Last Circus devolves into a horror farce.

First, Sergio beats Javier to within an inch of his life using a carnival mallet. Then, Javier escapes from the hospital and runs back to the circus tents bare-assed to maim Sergio with a meat hook. The carneys, who don’t want to report the crime to the police, carry Sergio’s body by elephant to a farm doctor who saves his life but leaves him horribly disfigured. Meanwhile, Javier escapes naked into the woods and lives off of raw deer meat until he’s discovered one day by—guess who?—the colonel he blinded as a teenager, who enslaves him and treats him (literally) like a dog. Instead of waiting patiently to be killed, Javier allows himself to free-fall into a complete psychotic breakdown in which he burns his face into a grotesque clown mask, dons a pope costume, procures two machine guns and goes on a killing spree.

With no end in sight despite the plot’s dive off the deep end, the movie heads into a plodding parade of camp carnage. Perhaps Mr. De la Iglesia intended to make a fatalistic farce, but even so, the loud three-ring circus he creates robs the film of any real meaning. It’s visually jarring—the film jumps back and forth between black and white, color, and some comic-book combination of the two—and the characters, who were, if not realistic, at least possible to relate to in the film’s first act, become garish monsters. After a certain point, there is nothing to feel except repulsion.

Sergio reemerges, his face a melted mess of stitches and teeth, and both he and Javier roam the streets trying to find Natalia and win her back—or to kill each other, whichever opportunity presents itself first (considering that the police are searching for Javier, and that his outfit and heavy artillery make him, let’s just say, conspicuous, he doesn’t seem to have any trouble walking around in broad daylight and terrorizing passersby). Eventually, the two clowns and their beloved acrobat end up atop a statue of a giant cross, battling to the death, but by the time the end finally comes, there’s no relief. You’re left with the vague recollection of an interesting movie you were watching before you got kidnapped and subjected to over an hour of torture porn starring a fat, sadistic clown.

Good luck sleeping tonight.

ulamarche@observer.com

THE LAST CIRCUS

Running time 107 minutes

Written and directed by Álex de la Iglesia

Starring Carlos Areces, Antonio de la Torre, Carolina Bang

1/4

Or at least those were the official words used about the events of April 8, when Antonio Calvo, a senior lecturer at Princeton's Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, beloved among the students, who called him St. Antonio, was suddenly exiled from the campus where he had worked for the previous 10 years.

"It's a euphemism I don't think you'll find on Wikipedia," said one lecturer, ahem, "preceptor" at Princeton.

Calvo's case garnered international attention when the maligned Spanish lecturer killed himself four days after he was told abruptly to leave Princeton. In the controversy that has surrounded his death, rumors have been floated as to the reasons for his dismissal, but the true circumstances of his suspension--and why he apparently was not given a chance to argue his case before he was told to leave--have not been made clear.

Princeton University's president, Shirley Tilghman, who has refused to divulge even the most general details of Mr. Calvo's particular leave-taking, has said only that it "came out of a review whose contents cannot be disclosed without an unprecedented breach of confidentiality." This statement, a Princeton University spokesperson told The Observer, "really is the extent of the information."

But it is very easy to discover that it is not. The narrative that has cohered amid the administration's cavernous silence, in the hundreds of comments on the school newspaper's Web site, in the pages of major newspapers in the United States and Spain and in what Dr. Tilghman quaintly calls "the blogosphere" is this: On April 8, Calvo received a letter from the chairwoman of his department, Gabriela Nouzeilles. According to The New York Times, which was leaked a copy, the letter stated, "We have received information from multiple sources that you have been engaging in extremely troubling and inappropriate behavior in the workplace."

The letter did not give specifics about the inappropriate behavior and, reached by phone at Princeton, Dr. Nouzeilles declined to provide any. According to Calvo's friends, the complaints that Calvo was aware of before his dismissal consisted of an email where he was said to have reprimanded a graduate student, in Spanish, with an order to "stop touching your balls" (a Spanish expression roughly akin to "stop sitting on your ass"). In the second incident, Calvo is said to have told a graduate student on an office visit that she deserved a slap for failing to do her job well. These exhortations, his friends said, were not meant to be taken literally.

According to The Times, the letter from Dr. Nouzeilles informed Calvo that he was suspended with pay and relieved of his teaching duties, and had to surrender his office key and university identification. On April 12, Calvo stabbed himself in his left arm and neck.

THE story of Calvo's dismissal has exemplified an uncomfortable conflict at elite universities, where procedures of hiring and promotion are determined by a strict caste system that gives rights to tenured professors that it does not afford to those who staff its lower ranks. Even supposing Calvo committed actions that would mandate immediate suspension--something his friends and former students vehemently deny--the very process of his dismissal is striking some as unfair.

"The issue of protecting the confidentiality is a convenient dodge," said William Potter, an alumnus who also works as a lecturer at Princeton and wrote a column in The Daily Princetonian asking for greater transparency in the Calvo case. "Any fear the university had of a defamation suit died with Professor Calvo. It's hard to see whose interests they're protecting."

Calvo started working at Princeton a decade ago, when he was still a graduate student in Spanish literature at CUNY. For graduate students at CUNY, teaching Spanish at Princeton was a good way to make some money, get teaching experience with crack students and gain access to Princeton's well-stocked libraries. By all accounts, Calvo also happened to love it.

In 2007, after he finished his Ph.D. on Langston Hughes and Federico Garcia Lorca, he applied for and earned the position of senior lecturer in Spanish at Princeton. In this job, Calvo not only taught classes but also coordinated all the Spanish teaching at Princeton. Because of Princeton's mandatory language requirement for undergraduates, he therefore managed a lot of sections. He was also tasked with managing complex relationships between outside lecturers, graduate students and the tenured faculty.

It was a job fraught with politics. At Princeton, the tenured faculty has minimal involvement in the nitty-gritty of teaching students the basics of Spanish grammar, reserving their energies for more lofty pursuits. Spanish is instead taught by two kinds of lecturers: graduate students from inside the university, who have to fulfill a teaching requirement, and those, such as Calvo, who are from outside the university. In the hierarchy of academia, people in Calvo's position are at the bottom of the academic totem pole, despite their Ph.D.'s and teaching duties, something some of Calvo's professors said they warned him about when he first became senior lecturer.

"He decided to accept a job that I consider very, very dangerous, particularly for a foreign person who needs a visa that's always attached to the institution that hires you," said Isaías Lerner, a professor who served on Calvo's dissertation committee when Calvo was a student at CUNY. "That creates a sense of power in the institution that is very unpleasant."

Dr. Lerner acknowledged, however, that it's hard to turn down a brand name like Princeton, Harvard or Yale. "Those are very seductive places," he said. "You have unbelievably intelligent and very selective students who you teach." And, he added, "they loved him."

But lecturers in Calvo's position tend to have trouble with graduate students. Unlike the outside lecturers, whose primary job at the university is to teach, the graduate students often view their research as more important. Teaching is seen as a grind, and an irritating distraction.

"They cancel classes, they don't want to teach at 9 a.m., it's usually a problem," said Marco Aponte-Moreno, a friend of Calvo's who used to work as a lecturer with him at Princeton and now teaches at the University of Surrey, in England. "That's the kind of context in which Antonio was working."

In November 2010, as his first three years as senior lecturer were coming to a close, Calvo's contract came up for review, a standard procedure outlined in the university's official employment policy.

Flor Gragera de Leon, a former Princeton lecturer and a friend of Calvo's, called him in the middle of March, when she began to worry that his review process had become so prolonged. Dr. Gragera de Leon said she began hearing rumors that some people in the department were organizing a campaign against his reappointment as early as last November.

"Antonio seemed to be informed of the accusations being raised against him," she wrote in an email to The Observer. "I do not know whether he was aware of his words being 'interpreted' as sexual harassment. He certainly knew he was accused of having used that Spanish expression (vulgar language and that's all)."

As has been pointed out in the comment board of The Princetonian and in the Spanish newspapers, the likelihood that an Ivy League academic would interpret the words literally rather than in their colloquial context was slim.

"In my opinion," she continued, "if there existed such 'interpretation' of the Spanish expression in order to accuse Antonio, we can just think of absolutely malicious intentions (otherwise, complete, inconceivable ignorance)."  

On April 8, Calvo received the letter from Dr. Nouzeilles that resulted in his "abrupt leave-taking."

Ms. Gragera de Leon said the timing of his suspension was unfortunate--academic appointments in languages revolve around interviews held at the annual MLA convention in January. Having failed to interview at the 2011 convention, Calvo would have to wait at least a year if he ended up being fired from Princeton. Furthermore, Calvo would have to leave the country, as his visa was tied to his job.

"By losing his job at Princeton, he also lost the opportunity to renew his visa," said Dr. Lerner.

Immediate suspension without the opportunity to argue one's case is typically reserved for what the university calls "rare cases." Among other questions asked by Calvo's friends, former colleagues and students are why the university took months to arrive at the emergency that mandated Calvo's immediate suspension with two weeks left in the semester.

And then there's the university's commitment to silence.

When asked about what happened, Dr. Nouzeilles told The Observer only that "it's very disturbing for the people in the department," and that "there are a lot of distressed students, and that is our priority for the time being."

The students, meanwhile, are annoyed with this treatment.

"It seems that [university president] Shirley [Tilghman] is trying to paint the students asking questions as nothing but bereaved and perhaps misguided youth, but we are not," wrote a student who responded to The Observer's inquiry via email under the pseudonym "Sancho Panza."

"It's very easy for a President who has been less than forthcoming in the past week to frame a policy in a positive light without providing any documentation or pointing students in the direction of clearly set policy, if it indeed exists," the student wrote.

Other students have commented on the unequal treatment of lecturers and tenured professors.

"I think it is unfortunate that there is no official, or available, University policy regarding the dismissal of lecturers, since they have been at least as important to my personal academic career as full faculty members have been," wrote Phyllis Heitjan, a senior majoring in Spanish who had taken two classes with Mr. Calvo and traveled with him on the Princeton in Spain program.

"I am a student of foreign languages and have often had language classes with graduate students or lecturers rather than professors," Heitjan continued. "They are a very important demographic at this University, especially in language and cultural studies, and often are more engaged with undergraduate students than busy, important professors can be."

ewitt@observer.com

• The consumer price index for November comes out today. It probably rose, signaling inflation. But did it raise enough to finally placate the Federal Reserve? [Bloomberg]
• Look out, Spain! Moody's says it could very well cut your credit rating. Meanwhile, Standard & Poor's has its eye on you, Belgium. [Reuters]
• Goldman Sachs has brought on board former New York Fed bigwig Theo Lubke as its chief regulatory reform officer. [FT]
• November retail sales were the best they'd been since the company entered an economic tailspin in 2007. [WSJ]
• Republicans working on a 9/11 Commission-style report about the causes of the financial crisis will probably say U.S. housing policy is to blame. No one will even know they think that, though, because the version available in bookstores will contain the Democrats' telling of the tale. [NYT]

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor