Here’s a link to the New York Times story.

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And here’s a link (UD thanks Stephen) to where one of the people written about in the NYT piece seems to threaten to sue.

… the deep structure, if you will, of a situation. Example: Jockschool Louisiana State University is jacking up game ticket and parking prices because the program loses millions every year, and will lose more with every year, into the foreseeable future.

A few comments on the article:

Jesus H. Christ, ALLEVA. [Alleva is the athletic director.] You pay 4.6 million a year to ONE guy [- Les Miles, football coach -] and your ENTIRE DEPARTMENT is in the whole half of his salary? So whats your grand idea? Make the thousands of fans pay more instead of cutting elsewhere? … Ask [Les Miles] to take a pay cut to keep LSU football alive without going into the fans’ pockets. Asking 1 man to sacrifce or 100,000 men? You wanna bet on what the answer will be? Pathetic.

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[I]t’s bad enough you make loyal fans pay a kick back for the RIGHT to buy a ticket …. now you charge for parking that has been free for years … I could take my family to eat at Ruth’s Chris [Steakhouse] for less then what a coke and hot dog cost … Les Miles makes more then probably the rest of his coaches combined and the man can’t tell time … he recruits thugs and benches kids because he has his favorites… costing us national championships …

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the real issue is where is all the tv money, merchandising money, ticket money, bowl game money, etc etc ???? would love to see a breakdown of expenditures to see where the WASTE really is going.

… Saving Normal, his book

about the benighted DSM-V.

Recent discussion here.

[Click on the image for a bigger picture.]

… and just post a link before we even really read the thing!

Okay right so we fund research – we here being the federal government, being our taxes – and these three NYU medical researchers give the results to China in exchange for money.

Details here.

Life imitates art – Molly Bloom and gambling emerge in the real world, on the front page of the New York Times.

This Molly totally approves of gambling.

Her soliloquy – a tell-all, just like Leopold Bloom’s Molly’s – will appear in 2014.

It’s not clear if Bloom herself will appear in order to promote it. She might be in jail.

I think they really need to update this webpage. It says Stanley Chesley is a member of the Kentucky bar, but he’s not. He’s been disbarred.

The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the disbarment of famed class action lawyer Stanley Chesley, a partner at Waite Schneider Bayless & Chesley Co. in Cincinnati, for “unreasonable” fees received in the settlement of a class action. Under Ohio Rules of Professional Responsibility, the disbarment may provide grounds for disbarment in Ohio as well.

Eh, unreasonable is a relative thing. You think it’s unreasonable for Stanley to have collected 20.5 million dollars for doing nothing in a class action suit. Others may differ.

Let’s see what he did for his cut of the settlement.

[Chesley] show[ed] up at the mediation and [went] through the motions of announcing the agreement.

Nice work if you can get it; and he doesn’t have to pay back anything, so fine. However, his greed appears to have embarrassed the bar enough for them to dump him.

Ohio’s next.

UD, an English professor, is a big believer in re-reading what you wrote and editing as the need arises. Go to it, Cincinnati.

… asks UD‘s blogpal Ophelia Benson about a cleric who encourages the murder of gay people and positively insists that by eight years of age girls must be hidden behind the burqa.

Well, it’s an old story, British universities sponsoring the ideas of men who think like this – seems every time UD turns around a school is tussling with on-campus prayers that call for the death of apostates, etc., etc.

Now, in both of these cases there has ultimately been a sensible response: Mr Kill the Filthy Dogs has been cancelled; and the other university has asked that the content of prayers be submitted in advance. But the thing just keeps happening – British universities sponsor events that segregate women and prohibit them from asking questions, sponsor speakers who want to murder adulterous people… I mean adulterous women… I mean women accused of adultery…

Anyway. Maybe these most recent responses suggest that the British are getting some backbone.

Gentle Hitler meek and mild appears, a statue kneeling in prayer, as you peer through a hole in a wall at the site of the Warsaw ghetto. It’s an art installation.

Art journals dredge up the dead language people dredge up on occasions such as this. The artist’s work “reveal[s] contradictions at the core of today’s society.”

Praying little boy Hitler (We can look forward to praying little boy Pol Pot in the killing fields, praying little boy Stalin in the gulag, and praying little boy Assad in Aleppo.) is a quintessential work of kitsch – so much so that UD intends to feature it in her aesthetics course this semester. It conforms to Milan Kundera’s definition of the form: “the absolute denial of shit.” It’s the functional equivalent of “the Hitler with a song in his heart” in The Producers. Like Franz Liebkind, it wants to remind you that Hitler was essentially an innocent – a flawed human being like every one of us. He knows what he did was wrong, and if he were alive today and in touch with his inner child he’d be on his knees in the middle of the Warsaw ghetto praying for forgiveness.

Praying little boy Hitler conveys the important truth that we’re all potential Hitlers. Paul Berman, reviewing the work of Andre Glucksmann, writes:

The eleventh commandment that Glucksmann wants to append to the biblical ten is this: to know thyself as capable of being a monster – even if that means saying (and here the imp of excess wraps its fingers around Glucksmann’s neck […]), “Hitler, c’est moi.”

As more victims from the slaughter of 20 children and six adults were laid to rest, long funeral processions clogged the streets of Newtown …

Associated Press

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They walked out together into the fine fall day, scuffling bright ragged leaves under their feet, turning their faces up to a generous sky really blue and spotless. At the first corner they waited for a funeral to pass, the mourners seated straight and firm as if proud in their sorrow. […] “It seems to be a plague,” said Miranda, “something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?”

Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”

The voice of the people. Philosophy of education, American-style. If the University of Georgia students and alumni like to shit all over the campus during football games, “it’s a college campus for crying out loud.” That’s what college campuses are for.

To be well-treated is as unnerving as to be badly treated.

When you call room service at the Inn at Harvard, the person who answers says, “Good morning, Professor Soltan!”

The bed you’re lying on has gold-wrapped chocolates on it and is big enough to share with, at the very least, the cheating contingent of the Harvard basketball team.

Two nights ago, UD left her massive bed for a spanking new in-the-round lecture hall down the street, where Harvey Mansfield spoke about science, non-science, wisdom, and damn hippies. UD liked the talk, but as an old hippie disliked the claim that hippies are anti-scientific. “Hippies,” UD informed Mansfield later as they headed for his car, “are very serious about empirical science. Especially chemistry.”

The walled garden in front of Mansfield’s house has curved paths of ivies and rhodies and liriopes — all lit with white lights. This was a fine house with a Harvard-heavy crowd, but any anxiety UD might have felt about the snoot-factor lifted as soon as she began chatting with this genial, funny group. Several Straussians were there, all of them perfectly happy to try to explain this thing UD‘s been hearing about since her high school boyfriend, David Kosofsky, began describing it in 1968.

… this blog claims that Teresa Sullivan, expunged president, has filed suit. I have no idea whether it’s true, but if it is, lots of new documents will come to light.

UD‘s friend Jack sends her this breaking news from the campus of the University of Alberta: Three security guards were shot to death a few hours ago in an attempted robbery of an armored car in front of a bank machine. The location was a combined shopping mall and residence hall. A student who lives in the residence hall is quoted in my headline.

A few quick points about this developing story.

Don’t forget that Canada has a high level of private gun ownership.

Should universities not build shopping mall/residence hall combinations? This isn’t much of a solution. All urban (and many suburban) campuses have banks and bank machines, or are adjacent to these things. In the lobby of the campus building housing UD‘s office, there’s a Bank of America ATM. Whenever she sees uniformed men working on it, she thinks about how vulnerable they are (she is). But universities like George Washington University (four blocks from the White House) are so vulnerable in so many ways it’s not even funny. No one talks about dismantling these campuses.

There’s a real issue here having to do with notification of students, faculty, and staff. Woo claims she wasn’t notified:

On twitter, the university said that those within ‘close proximity’ were notified. i live in hub and i witnessed many of these events. i, along with many other students, did not get any sort of emergency notification. i am extremely disappointed in the lack of concern the university places on student safety.

Look at the Pope over there in Vatican City taking a star turn in What the Butler Saw as his city state fails to “shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”

Look at the big happy family of University of Texas scientists who just went ahead and gave the family a huge state grant, without bothering to check with the provost or anything.

And look at another huge bureaucracy, the place UD‘s father spent his entire scientific career: the National Institutes of Health. The NIH just went ahead and gave America’s own tête d’affiche pour conflit d’intérêts (Charles Nemeroff has been called poster boy for conflict of interest so many times, I thought I’d jazz it up by putting it in French) another big grant, since you want to encourage his sort of behavior… or whatever…

I mean, it’s about bureaucracies, isn’t it? In all three cases? You’ve got cronies and histories of you do me and I do you and all… Everybody’s in everybody else’s pocket…

But eventually, as in all three of these cases, things get so brazen that the media notices; and then, if the money involved comes from taxpayers, politicians get all het up about it. As in this what the fuck? letter from Senator Charles Grassley to NIH. Grassley sends a copy to the notorious Donna Shalala.

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More coverage of the nettlesome Nemeroff.

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The latest University of Miami scandal jumps to the Miami Herald. Shalala and Nemeroff are trying out the no comment option, but I don’t think it’s going to work.

… essay? Opinion piece? Indictment? Not sure what to call it.

It appears in ESPN, of all places, and expresses a strange emotion – hopelessness, I guess. There’s something religious, something sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God about it. It recalls some of the most disgusting scandals in college football in the last few months, missing quite a few of them but touching on enough to make the tired point about the stinking corruption of the enterprise.

But this is a routine rhetorical strategy, beginning your article about the vileness of all aspects of university football by reviewing five or six of the most recent you-could-pukes. Usually the next step is to point out that even by those standards the Miami story startles; or people are getting upset but really the latest Chapel Hill vomit isn’t chunky enough to count… (Here’s a good example. Typical sentence: “After the last 12 months, which were filled with scandal and cover-ups and lies and payouts and allegations of child molestation and motorcycles and mistresses, The Ohio State recently reported something like four dozen secondary violations and we didn’t bat an eye.”)

Instead of this, the author goes all Ballad of Reading Gaol:

We make a monster of what we love, and to make a point about what our society honestly values, a writer might post here a comparison of the state-by-state salaries of head football coaches and governors… In the end we remain helpless against ourselves.

Each man kills the thing he loves, it turns out. As in the endlessly anthologized poem by James Wright about the beginning of football season in American towns:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

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We who are about to die for you losers salute you. Our mothers lie abed wondering why instead of fucking them our fathers want to watch us concuss.

Has another year of scandal and revelation and condemnation finally undone the sport? Are Petrino, Tressel, Paterno, Miami or Montana the beginning of the end?

C’mon. Does any casual fan, any casual reader, any casual viewer, any reasonable person anywhere at the beginning of the 21st century think of “big football schools” as anything other than big football schools?

As it was in 1905, it was another tough year for fans. How do you root for what’s on the helmet without worrying about what’s in it?

Yet we remain helpless against not merely our indifference to what’s in it but indeed to what’s on it. What fan really gives a shit whether it’s Auburn or Alabama? What you’re after is gladiatorial gore good enough to get you going.