.. Heidi/Ho dispute raging between our next presidents. There’s nothing like men for a catfight, and these two cats…!

Already dark rumors begin to surface of rad-rectitudinous Ted having strayed… And if you think UD is not champing at the bit to watch the Ted Cruz version of this, you have not been reading this blog with care. Dear Lord, bring it on.

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And don’t forget to bring guns!

A model for so many other All-Male Sex Cult Universities up and down this great land. 

This blog tries to chronicle life at these locales.  It’s a big job.

Things have taken a sinister turn at Boston College, where despite raking in huge yearly sums simply by being in a big-time league, the entire university, starting with its president, is suffering from ACCedia – the dark night of the soul in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Unlike its sister affliction, acedia, which refers to a “gradual indifference to the faith,” ACCedia involves a gradual indifference to being a fan. The money’s still coming in, the games are still being staged, but no one cares, and almost no one shows up in the stands.

Allow UD to draw from her years of experience writing about university football and basketball in order to suggest some reasons for this strange turn of events.

The big glaring reason is this one: You’re either willing to give your full soul over to football, or you are not. You’re either fully committed to your completion percentage, or you are not. You’re either willing to spend most of your school’s money on athletics, admit academically unqualified players, and wrest all control over sports decisions from the school’s president, or you are not. Boston College languishes in a limbo of less than thorough football fervency.

To be sure, BC is doing some things right: It has appointed as the highest-paid person at a Catholic college a man whose every other word, on national television, is fuck. “[The football coach’s] profane sideline behavior [was] most damaging [during] a nationally televised loss to Notre Dame at Fenway Park, first when a camera focused on Addazio shouting the F-word, then when he received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for berating the officials.” You want a Christian role model at the very top, a signal lesson in how to behave if you want to earn the lord’s rewards, and Steve Addazio fits the bill.

And you want to schedule hard-hitting games.

In one of BC’s most embarrassing episodes last season, the Eagles defeated a stunningly inferior team from Howard University, 76-0, the game shortened by 10 minutes because of the mismatch.

That’s the kind of gladiatorial combat that puts butts in seats. Another way Addazio is earning his money.

But utter spiritual alignment with football does not end here. “God does not want you for a fair-weather friend,” as Marilla says to Anne at Green Gables farm, and the Boston College community has not yet learned this lesson. Being a fan is not merely about cheering on wins; it is about cheering on losses as well. If you cannot maintain enthusiastic faith in a team that loses most of its games, you are demonstrating a fundamental incapacity to perceive the divinity of sport.

The solution must begin in the soul – the collective soul of Boston College. UD suspects, for instance, an insufficiency of gridiron liturgy during public worship at BC. At every possible point during the mass and other sacred occasions, football (and basketball, if there’s time) should be invoked. BC has much to learn from Notre Dame here. And from Florida State.

… and the man after whom the school’s Rennert Entrepreneurial Institute is named, once again shows YU students how to conduct themselves in business.

[T]he government said that Renco had lied when asked about the transaction to keep the pension insurer from finding out about the ownership change until too late. Once a controlled group has been broken, the pension agency loses its ability to go after the parent company’s assets.

And four months later, when R.G. Steel declared bankruptcy, the federal government had to take over the pension obligations and cover a $70 million loss. It sued Renco for fraud, arguing that the deal with Cerberus was a sham, intended primarily to break the link between R.G. Steel and Renco’s wealth.

Details on pensioners and their retirement income here.

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Sure, every once in awhile, just like Yeshiva trustee Zigi Wilf, you attract the attention of the courts. Big deal. Price of doing business.

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Now, REI grads, go out there and make some deals!

… who has inspired a lawsuit from Renee Rabinowitz.

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WALK AWAY, RENEE

And when I see the breasts that point my way
The sluts I’m forced to pass by every day

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself near your filth
The empty seating over there will do for you
Apostate Jew

From deep inside the vomit I’m forced to spew
From deep inside the vomit triggered by you

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself next to you
Now as my lust beats down upon my weary eyes
Crush her, it cries

Your breasts and hips inside a plane upon a seat
Still find a way to haunt me with their heat

Just walk away, Renee
You won’t see me foul myself by your side
The empty seating over there will do for you
Apostate Jew

Face to face I’ll see my savior
Face to face so near to me
When with rapture I elect Cruz
And he shows the face of God to me

Cruz has got the holy head shot
Cruz that good ol’ pol of mine
So step right up! Yes, step right up!
To see the countenance divine

Fascinating ongoing performance art installation at Dortmund University, where a non-denominational “silent” room has been transformed by a group of students into a Muslim prayer room, with extensive directives mandating the segregation and veiling of women.

Note, in this image, how students have turned on its side a mural depicting trees in sunlight, and re-purposed it into a woman-hiding partition.

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SILENCE = HADITH (UD‘s title) isn’t really installation art. It began as an “experiment,” in the words of a university spokeswoman, in providing a neutral quiet space for students who might want to sit in peace a bit amid the “stresses of university life.”

The experiment has gone poorly. Since the room’s inauguration in 2012 there’s been a running battle between the university and a group of Muslim students who persistently dress it up as their own. Then when female students go there for a little down time and are ordered to put on a veil and hide behind a wall – and this is just UD talking but those sound more like stressors than de-stressors – the students complain to the administration and things get more stressful still.

So Tranquillity Base has been abandoned.

At Baylor University, things have certainly reached a pretty pass.

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They’ve fallen down on the rape front at Rutgers athletics, but in every other way they’re maintaining the school’s distinction.

Since 2009, questionable behavior or oversight has prompted the resignations or firings of two men’s basketball coaches, a football coach and two athletic directors.

Last fall, several current and former football players were arrested and charged with armed robbery and other crimes.

… In 2013-14, the athletic department had a $36 million deficit that had to be subsidized by university discretionary funds and student fees. That was the highest subsidy among 230 schools surveyed by USA Today.

Hubba hubba!

Yeshiva University. Baylor University. Our nation’s flagship religious hypocrisy campuses.

… of her “fringe and vociferous group,” Women of the Wall. Recall UD, featured here in the Forward (scroll down to her smiling and her holding her prayer shawl), at a rally outside the Israeli embassy on behalf of religious freedom in Israel.

And, well, WOW. We won.

(Your blogueuse.)

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Chelsea Clinton: J’ACCUSE!

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin sharply attacked the American Jewish Reform movement during Sunday’s government hearing on the compromise regarding a non-Orthodox prayer space at the Western Wall, saying that Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to her Jewish partner, officiated by a Reform rabbi and a priest, shows the extent of assimilation among Reform Jews in the United States.

“… [A] man who calls himself a reform rabbi is standing there with a priest and weds Hillary Clinton’s daughter, and no one condemns it, thereby legitimizing it.”  

UD‘s Canadian friend Jack sends her news of another Acting Out university instructor. The Acting Out person is almost always a middle-aged guy whose sense of himself as uniquely possessed of difficult and shocking truths that must somehow – anyhow – be conveyed to students has gotten way out of hand.

Like this guy a few years ago at Columbia University who taught physics by “stripping down, curling up in a fetal position and letting ninjas harass him while a projection of the Twin Towers falling and the Holocaust played on the television.” Or this guy – at Leeds University – who also stripped down to convey important truths about events management. There was also a Canadian who taught physics by talking almost exclusively about hidden political “power structures” and then giving all of his students A’s.

And now there’s this other Canadian who teaches intro psych by having his students sign a contract in which they promise to let him use all the naughty words he wants, in exchange for which students will be exposed to such “advanced methods of problem solving” that they will no longer be “duped by social-political agendas.”

Or – as he puts it in another section of the contract – after taking his course, the student will “be minimally influenced by unpleasant experiences.”

Students must read a list of the naughty words and then sign off on them.

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Some of the writing in the contract is mysterious.

If I require special needs I will not approach the professor in order to maintain my anonymity but instead arrange a convenient meeting with the professor and the Special Needs Office.

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Sample exam questions, some of them anecdotal (Students at Laurentian’s med school were told to stick their fingers in a corpse’s rectum and then lick their fingers…) also appear in the contract.

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For UD there has always been a pathos to the Acting Out professor. This is a man who has, after years of confusion and repression, liberated himself – politically, sexually. He’s excited about this, and wants to share it with students. As James Merrill put it, these men are “sharing pain like fudge from home.” Pain (“unpleasant experiences”) has been for them, and will be for their students, superseded by pleasure, so that by the end of the semester everyone will be like Joel Osteen, bursting with the joy of a new life.

Good Christian school rejoice!
With heart and soul and voice.
Give ye heed to what we say:
News! News!
Settlement is reached today.
Lots of cash has been dispensed
Ukwuachu won’t play defense.
Settlement today! Settlement today!

Although he never played a game
He’s brought our school yet more infame
Than we endured with Elliott.
News! News!
We covered up as best we could
Til justice caught us up but good.
Smile, Smile and silent be!
Wait out this ignominy.

A Jewish Week writer thinks about end of year charitable giving.

Yeshiva University president Richard Joel received a $1.6 million deferred compensation payout on top of his $738,180 salary despite the university’s $150 operating deficit…,

… I’m sure [Joel thinks he] is underpaid and doing the Lord’s work, but how many of [Yeshiva’s] contributors realize that their donations are going to pay salaries they could only dream of and bonuses that probably exceed their own income for at least this year if not more?

A president who drives your university into junk status and gives Bernard Madoff an honorary degree doesn’t come cheap.

… smiling?