So West Virginia University goes after some jerk in the stands wearing a West Fucking Virginia t-shirt?
How about not having hired Rick Rodriguez? Don’t you think if you hadn’t hired Rick Rodriguez that might have helped your image? Or how ’bout that Dana Holgorsen?
Nah – let’s not go after coaches. Let’s go after … that guy! See that guy in the picture? No, not that one. The one wearing the shirt. See?
Let’s liquor up our students and then release big old letters about them to the national press when they act stupid!
That’s how we deal with our students. Coaches? Well, policy there is like this: Give them millions of dollars and let them act like shits and then either
1. keep them on the payroll anyway; or
2. give them millions in severance.
That does capture it. And the value is totally monetary. For the rest… well, start with the University of Miami. And work your way down.
The escalating TV dollars are reshaping the amateur realm of college sports. With more money at stake, coaches say, the pressure to win is rising. Head coaches have long earned multimillion-dollar salaries, but now the TV money is cascading into the ranks of assistant coaches. Gus Malzahn, the offensive coordinator at Auburn University, college football’s defending national champion, has received a new deal valued at $1.3 million annually. Schools are also pouring money into stadium renovations and new training facilities.
In Tuesday’s Notice of Allegations from the NCAA, containing nine major alleged violations by the football program, former university tutor Jennifer Wiley was identified as paying $1,789 worth of parking tickets for one of the eight players named on Friday.
Yes, at the University of North Carolina they go the extra mile for their student-athletes, who “racked up 395 campus parking tickets totaling $13,125 in fines over a three-and-a-half year span.”
… that there’s big news about Osama Bin Laden.
Killed or captured?
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Update: Bin Laden is dead.
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Remember.
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People are gathering at the White House to celebrate.
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Looks as though there are a lot of GW students among the celebrants.
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From the Gaston Gazette:
[Adam] Royston lives in a dorm just a few blocks away from the White House. He held up his cell phone and chants of “USA, USA” could be heard. He likened Sunday night’s celebration to gatherings for a new government in Egypt.
“There are tons of American flags,” said Royston, who is studying Middle Eastern government at the private school in the nation’s capital. “People are just running for the White House. I just knew that since this is a great day that I had to be there.
“This has got to be the most exciting day at George Washington University in my freshman year.”
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From the Associated Press:
Twenty-year-old Alex Washofsky came despite finals on Monday at George Washington University. He’s also a member of the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps.
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More GW reaction.
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Tomorrow, after she gives a final exam at GW, UD will again visit the Pentagon Memorial. She wrote about it in 2008, here.
Right after having seen a tepid performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf last month, UD turned to Taylor’s Martha and admired it all over again.
[The 2012] budget proposes no changes to traditional Pell grants, which are currently at their highest level ever. What it does is halt, after just two years, a program launched in the 2009-2010 school year that allowed students to apply for a whole second Pell grant for summer school or if they took extra credits.
That program turned out to cost 10 times more than expected, and there was no evidence it was helping anyone graduate from college faster. Instead, it appeared to be the case that for-profit colleges were gaming the system to encourage students to apply for the additional grants to take academically questionable courses.
The tax-profiteers play their games and ruin a good program.
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Update: Trash talk.
UD‘s stomping grounds are described in this way in today’s Washington Post, and it seems about right (though Mr UD claims “We are not a village.”). It’s an article about all the generators people are buying, given the constant power outages.
Because I’m feeling a little better (I’ve got bronchitis), and because today was warm and sunny, I went out to our back acre and began removing the many limbs that fell during what people are calling the thundersnow. I broke smaller branches off of big fallen trees and tossed them into the woods next to our property. Then I dragged the stripped trees into the same woods.
Background on Joseph Kubacki here.
Kubacki is a son of the late Reading Mayor John C. Kubacki, who was indicted on extortion charges by a federal grand jury in 1964, the last year of his first mayoral term.
John Kubacki was convicted along with reputed Reading mobster Abe Minker of extorting $10,000 from parking meter vendors who were told they should pay up or lose their city contracts.
The opening wedge.
Eventually all American university courses will be taught at coffee houses.
The University of Oregon: It’s all about Phil’s spigot.
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I originally got the name of the school wrong.
Thanks, TAFKAU, for correcting me.
… has been shot, along with others, at a public event in Tucson.
Her Wikipedia page.
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She has died, according to NPR.
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More recent reports state that she is in critical condition.
… writes Richard Wilbur in the poem Year’s End; and let’s consider the point he’s making in his stately, nicely rhymed stanzas as we stare December 31 in the face.
At the very end of Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens describes us – well, describes “casual flocks of pigeons” symbolically us – flying in a downward direction at night:
And in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Down we go to death; but on the other hand our wings are “extended” — our arms open out to “More time, more time,” Wilbur writes.
And: As we sink down, we create beautiful, complex “undulations.” Formal grace, and mystery, express themselves in the patterns of our existences.
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Evening’s one thing; evening on December 31 packs mortality-intimation awfully tightly. Stevens’ poem after all is about morning, Sunday morning, the way Sunday morning can be dreadful if you’re suspended somewhere between secularity and belief, if you’d like to believe in some form of soulful immortality. Wilbur has us at night, and the night of December 31 at that; so questions of our mortal fragility and the shape – make it the undulating shapeliness – of our lives – are perhaps even more urgent.
Both poets in any case want to capture the peculiar tenterhooks we’re on – brightly appareled in our lives, we stretch our wings. Yet our true condition is, writes Wilbur, like that of leaves trapped in ice: “Graved on the dark in gestures of descent.” We’re “flutter[ing]” still, but down under the ice. We’re gesturing still, but always in postures of descent. Downward to darkness on extended wings.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
The patterns, if patterns there are, in our frayed lives, express themselves only after we’re dead. Or maybe something of a pattern occurs to us while we sit, in the isolation of the evening sky, prodded into contemplation by a sudden end of time.
A physician who rocked a UC Irvine fertility clinic 15 years ago when he and a partner switched the frozen embryos of dozens of unsuspecting women, has been taken into custody by Mexican authorities, officials said Monday.
Ricardo Asch, one of two fertility doctors who fled prosecution as the scandal unfolded, was arrested in Mexico City on Nov. 3, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. He remains in custody as U.S. prosecutors seek to extradite him to Southern California to face federal mail fraud and tax evasion charges
LA Times
… provision of food content (grilled cheese sandwich), UD read a letter in the New York Times about the provision of course content:
To the Editor:
… [W]e should be extremely wary of the move toward online education…
People cheat. All the time. Sure, they cheat on campus, but it is extraordinarily easy to cheat online. The easiest way is to simply have someone else do the course for you. Another way is by searching for information while taking a test.
… If the company or university is going online to save money, you bet it will try to cut corners as much as it can. That means a noninteractive, bottom-of-the-line course, with students able to cheat easily.
We are truly on the race to the bottom…
Diana Lambert
Bottom-of-the-line, race to the bottom — As you know, UD has for years called online the poor white trash of education. I believe the letter writer is getting at the same idea.
Or think about it this way: When all the university’s doing is providing course content in the quickest, most efficient fashion, students feel quite comfortable providing, in return, exam content in the very same way. Students are responding in kind to the pointed disdain for students, and for education, that online represents. It’s a right back at ya situation.
With online, everybody gets an A for contempt.
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Online’s bold new idea: We’ll save money by not educating our students.
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Hey, and here’s another problem on the horizon: Presidents of online universities make like forty million dollars a year. Eventually, presidents of massive public universities which have become almost entirely online will start demanding commensurate compensation.
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UD thanks Dennis.
