Or, uh, Drew. My Drew. Lazy, dim, and… er… let’s say not entirely straightforward. But can he ever coach swimmers! The taxpayers of Indiana can’t wait to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to my Drew!

God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy coach
Without reproach
From sea to shining sea.

******************

(UD thanks Jon.)

Quilty’s borrowing scheme didn’t work out at all well in Lolita (Humbert killed him anyway). Nor, more recently, did University of Texas baseball player Cameron Cox’s. He borrowed a teammate’s pee for a urine test – knowing that his own, I guess, would be drug-laced – and of course the other player was also drugging himself, so they both got in trouble.

… the worst university in America. Go ahead and type UNIVERSITY GEORGIA in my search engine. You’ll get a few hits for other Georgia universities, but mainly you’ll get one unbelievable UGA scandal after another. The board of trustees tried to take over the student newspaper because they haven’t heard about press freedom. A professor shtupped one of his students in front of other students. Sports teams are endlessly full of gun-toting miscreants. After tailgating, the campus is literally a pile of shit. The school has outrageous rates of student alcoholism.

The school is of course on this year’s top-ten party school list; it always makes the list, and often tops it.

The latest is that Jim Donnan, UGA’s amazingly compensated football coach (he recently left), is under federal indictment as a Ponzi schemer. Most of his victims seem to have been his fellow sports morons.

UGA. As ever, a class act.

The killer was seventeen years old.

The chair of their trustees thinks big-time sports are “integral” to universities, and ASU, a perennial game loser, spends hugely on them (expenditures have gone up 44% since 2005). Campus culture is what you’d expect – scads of drunken fuckheads. You can watch them on their latest outing here. It’s bound to be a YouTube sensation — timely publicity for ASU as it competes with Chico State for the gun toting asshole applicant pool. This 2012 article describes an alarmed populace as ASU demolishes all frat and sorority houses (why?) and allows colonization of neighboring streets. With rhetoric suited to a war zone, ABC News headlines:

Frat Party Violence Escalating at Arizona State University

Dispatches from the war zone:

At [one] point, gunshots were fired. The ensuing panic sent hundreds of partygoers running for their lives.

We sing to you, dear ASU.

He also claims that Wardle prevented him from enrolling in some science classes because a biology major would interfere with his athletic career in the years ahead.

Whatever happened to the American university? Once a quiet setting for serious thought, it’s become a shrieking sado-masochistic bedlam, captured most recently by this now-notorious SNL sketch, but really – as our latest perverted campus demonstrates – beyond parody. How do you parody a coach who reportedly made a player who felt unwell keep running in the team “boot camp” until the player lost control of his bowels? Who routinely called the same player a faggot and a pussy? Who “encouraged him to violate his religious beliefs by having sex with a girl in order to improve his play”?

Rest assured that Coach Brian Wardle makes pretty much the highest salary on campus, so the university is doing all it can to encourage his technique. If he’s made to leave, it will likely cost the university tons in buyout money.

How did things get so unspeakably sordid?

Big-time sports.

Tee-hee. Well, state legislators can’t do anything about these two, uh, power centers of the modern American university, so in desperation you sometimes see them – here it’s a guy from Minnesota – issue these sorts of statements. The mental image you should have accompanying Pelowski’s remarks is a frustrated one-year-old kicking his feet against a wall. Except that in this case all-grown-up Gene Pelowski has very accurately and eloquently identified the sources of his frustration.

It’s only frustrating, though, if you think your state university system should be – by some non-athletic standard or other – good.

And why be angry at the idea that spending that money on Tubby is an investment in the future? In the future, the University of Minnesota will be even more strongly – perhaps someday to the point of exclusivity! – associated with basketball.

It is – and always has been – curious to UD, as an observer of universities, that the most violent and mindless game out there totally dominates America’s universities. Universities, where the main thing, you figure, is the mind, get positively orgasmic about, and spend themselves into bankruptcy over, a game which we now know pummels the mind to mush.

Forget the body. Of course we know – quoting John Kass again here –

The game is not just a contact sport — it’s a high-impact collision sport. It is about exploding into your opponent, refusing to break, while breaking others to your will and knocking them senseless.

But Kass also notes that “football scrambles the human brain.” He notes the massive and growing numbers of lawsuits coming from high school, college, and professional teams, as players literally lose their minds. Kass predicts football itself will die in the next few decades.

***********************

UD, however, doubts it. Why? Here’s Kass again:

Make no mistake. I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it…

Universities, at least according to this guy, can’t survive without a foundation of violent tribal ritual:

It is irrational and tribal love. It is intense emotion, not a vague sense of obligation or philanthropy. [Students and alumni] want to beat State.

Read his heavy-breathing about “shirtless boys” and ask yourself whether passions like these can ever be tamed. Whether the American university can survive without them. Already – in coach buyouts alone – university football is destroying the financial foundation of many schools. Those same schools will not hesitate to pay out hundreds of millions more in personal injury claims.

The model here will be big pharma. As a corporate endeavor, pharma cheats and injures, but as long as it can afford to pay out billions every year in legal settlements and still make a big profit, it will continue to do so. Universities will hit up students for higher and higher athletic fees, and students – even more subject to these passions than alumni, it seems – will willingly give.

************

UD thanks mwm.

It’s like this — Imagine that someone comes along today and accuses Silvio Berlusconi of bribery, fraud, abuse of office, and solicitation of minors for sex. Although he may be totally innocent of these particular charges, Silvio has a decades-long record of allegations, trials, and convictions on just these categories of charges.

Similarly, Auburn University, one of America’s scummiest sports factories, has been in the grade-changing, fake-independent-study, cash-for-athletes game for decades. As the writer for MrSEC.com notes (I quote him in my headline), that school can do all the internal investigations it wants. You and I know that Auburn smells, and always will. So we figure – probably rightly – that it’s guilty of this most recent batch of charges.

News flash from this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina.

Who knew?

It’s hard to know what to do with university newspaper columns that start in this way. I guess the best thing to do is stop reading.

You’re up!

You don’t want well-written and well-reasoned letters like this one fucking with your core business.