Some professors look at a room full of students and see propaganda dupes, army recruits. Teaching for these people is rallying the troops, reminding them every Tuesday and Thursday of the cosmic justice of the cause.

There are more agitprop profs around than you might think. UD has covered a ton of them on this blog, including a very curious Canadian physics instructor…

Slightly more benign versions of the rabble-rouser are professors who are running for state rep and who give their students extra credit for leafleting on their behalf, and professors who have found personal liberation via this or that guru and want to burble to the kids about it for two and a half hours a week. And of course there are professors who simply steal money from the sitting ducks. Details here.

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Universities need to be vigilant about all of this, er, extracurricular activity; but it’s often hard to know what’s up, and students will tolerate amazing amounts of shit from professors before they complain.

When things get way over-the-top, however, students will complain, as they did a number of years ago at UD‘s own George Washington University. A visiting professor’s course, Arab-Israeli Conflict, turned out to be Israeli Wonderland. According to students, she virtually never mentioned the Arab world, let alone bothered arguing about/against it, and instead sang the praises of the land from which she came. She left the university.

And now there’s the course Berkeley shut down. And then reopened. I think.

Berkeley has a deal where undergrads can teach one-credit courses. This course was one of those.

Here’s the first article about it. After complaints by Jewish groups about the allegedly doctrinaire, relentlessly anti-Israeli nature of the course, the school suspended it. But then they reinstated it. But (the article’s last line) a “new version [of its syllabus] now goes to the Academic Senate’s course committee for consideration.” UD is confused.

Anyway. A Berkeley prof’s defense of the course is a little shaky, seems to me.

The student instructors “are not going to be teaching [some of these courses] from a balanced, cautious perspective — they’re impassioned,” she said.

“It’s as if I were to say, ‘Let’s consider U.S. history through the perspective of Native American genocide,’ … “There are people who’d say, ‘What about George Washington?’ Well, they can teach that course, too.”

Balance is for the cautious! Let your passions rule!

Is it Berkeley, or is it To God Be the Glory U?

A Catholic university said the president of Mexico met the requirements for graduation with a law degree, while acknowledging parts of his 1991 thesis were plagiarised.

Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City issued a statement late on Sunday, saying the thesis submitted by then-student Enrique Pena Nieto – elected president in 2012 – conformed with the standards of the time.

“The thesis introduced original ideas” and used outside ideas with and without citations, the statement said. “The (current) general regulations of our institution are not applicable to former students.”

Like Catholic, football-obsessed Boston College, Notre Dame of all places is beginning to show signs of spiritual strain. More and more fans confess that the school’s squalid football program – which slimes along its merry way accompanied by a tireless chorus of We’re godly from the school – is so squalid, so hypocritical, that they just can’t do it anymore. Notre Dame is a choir boy gone rancid, and while most of the congregants have decided through an effort of will to grip their hymnals ever tighter and ignore the stinky lad, some have become overwhelmed by the smell. They may still buy tickets to the games, but they’re “finding it hard to care very much.” They’re finding it hard to forget six player arrests in one night, and blahblahblah you know the picture. You know it from forthrightly filthy programs like University of Miami, and you know it from equally but not at all forthrightly filthy Notre Dame.

Notre Dame is Blanche DuBois flouncing around a dump, twirping about her moral purity and her clean bright Southern manse. You just want to look away.

Buy a drink and pull a chair
Up to the edge of the dance floor
Bouncers bouncing through the night
Trying to stop or start a fight

Six University of Notre Dame football players got in so much trouble between last Friday night and Saturday morning that UD is worried they won’t be ready for church today.

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But that’s the least of it. Six players is a lot for a team to lose, and there’s a season of football to be played.

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No, no, calm down. They’ll all be back on the field in minutes. America’s most famous Catholic university offers compassion to its students who carry loaded unregistered handguns, beat up policemen, and resist arrest. After Friday and Saturday, there’s Sunday, when you receive forgiveness.

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So. Six Notre Dame FB players arrested overnight. One more and [Coach] Brian Kelly gets a free sub, I think.

Rick Gregg

… for our own good.

[Trump’s] campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, told The Huffington Post in May that Trump’s documents are too dense to be made public: “His tax returns are incredibly complicated. I wouldn’t understand them, so how are the American people going to?”

…than… you!

A limerick for Baylor University.

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‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

A student got raped down at Baylor?
The school’s got a great way to nail her —
You’re a harlot who drinks!
Your immortal soul stinks!
Now who’ll be the next to impale her?

… Backed Out.

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But – good news! They’re still going to be able to keep it in the family: The attorney who put Ivanka’s husband’s father in jail will be speaking.

Needed to make a correction. Intended the star to be yellow.

Just because.

Lozano said she was slapped, kicked, slammed against a wall and against a car by Chafin in 2014.

But misogynistic thuggery IS Waco! Every city has to be about something, and only Waco boasts a biker massacre at a breastaurant, Branch Davidian child rape, and a religious university complicit in the rape of its women students.

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Baylor University: Stupid is as stupid does.

The disregard for victims at Baylor wasn’t some kind of oversight. It wasn’t merely callous. It was sick. What kind of adult looks into the beseeching face of a young victim who could be his or her own daughter and decides that football is more important?

The Ken Starr kind. The same kind that went after the Clintons, first on trumped up public charges, then for sex. It’s this very cycle of history, coming back to take Starr down at last, that Baylor missed seeing over its shoulder and now is bumbling and stumbling in panic to evade.

Recipe for a successful marriage.

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UD thanks Barney.

— Now what is the meaning of this word retreat and why is it allowed on all hands to be a most salutary practice for all who desire to lead before God and in the eyes of men a truly christian life? A retreat, my dear boys, signifies a withdrawal for awhile from the cares of our life, the cares of this workaday world, in order to examine the state of our football program, to reflect on the mysteries of holy gridiron and to understand better why we are here in this league. During these few days I intend to put before you some thoughts concerning the four last things. They are, as you know, the NCAA death penalty, retrenchment (for this we look in fellowship to our Brother in Football, Southern Methodist University), new recruitment, and the wondrous beginning of a Rebirth in Football. We shall try to understand them fully during these few days so that we may derive from the understanding of them a lasting benefit to our win/loss stats. And remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to win football games no matter the price. All else is worthless. One thing alone is needful, the regional championship. What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his coach? Ah, my dear boys, believe me there is nothing in this wretched world that can make up for such a loss.