Both – to their despair – find themselves headline news this week. And why? Because no matter how much divides us, sexual strangeness, and a kind of desperate emotional lostness/loneliness, unites us.

We all have access to these things – I mean, being sexually strange; and feeling, in a restless, panicky way, lost and alone – though if we’re lucky in life and love we may seldom experience them.

Smith – until recently a powerful, highly paid coach at Ohio State; and Ronell – a powerful, highly paid professor at NYU, seem to have experienced these things more acutely than most other people; more importantly, their sense of their invulnerability to punishment seems to have allowed them to behave with total abandon. Ronell is tenured; Smith and the famed OSU head coach, Urban Meyer, have a very close personal relationship. Ronell was found guilty of sexually harassing one of her graduate students; she had, with unaccountable stupidity, written down everything culpable she had done in emails. Smith took dick pics of himself in the White House and on the OSU campus and sent them to friends; he ordered large numbers of sex toys to be delivered to his university office, and openly boasted of sexual encounters in the same office with various subordinates.

In both cases as well, powerful friends of these powerful people protected and defended them, which is another whole scandal. In a just-filed lawsuit, Ronell’s graduate student has credibly claimed that Ronell’s associates

launched a widespread disinformation campaign against [Nimrod] Reitman, falsely accused him of, among other things, having waged a ‘malicious campaign’ against Ronell and having a ‘malicious intent,’ thereby further ruining his hopes for any future career in academia.

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Of course there are differences between these two. Zach Smith appears to be a complete mess: Along with what I have already described, he has been arrested for drunk driving; and his ex-wife accuses him of extensive and extreme domestic violence. Ronell is far from a mess; what she is, rather, despite her revolutionary self-presentation, is that saddest of traditional figures: An older woman whose self-regard convinces her she remains attractive to men. Ronell was helped along by countercultural ideology; Smith was helped along by a hypermasculine, alcoholic, risk-taking sports culture.

But under these two current tragicomic figures from the American university lies the same old same old: self-destruction.