Kaleigh Robins, a 21-year-old [Indiana University] student, said the atmosphere at tailgates has changed — in part because of an increased police presence.

“I’ve never been ID’d before at a tailgate before now,” Robins said.

Students also are banned from playing music at the tailgates, and she said there are no longer any “handles” — half-gallon bottles of liquor that are staples at college parties.

“It’s kind of sad,” she said.

Kristi Tan, a 23-year-old recent IU graduate, agreed.

“It’s like old glory died down…”

The Harry Potter language suggests that the most outrageously scandalous loser among American universities – SUNY Binghamton – got that way due to evil visited upon it by outside forces. But SUNY was the architect of its own doom, having waged a cynical and greedy campaign for Division I glory. Now it gets to enjoy years of pathetic budgets and vile publicity.

We’ve got it all – the article written before the stabbing (one of several fights) at our first basketball event of the season (“We have the best fans in college basketball!”), and the article written after the place was evacuated and the stabbed guy was taken to the hospital (“We were saddened to learn…”).

Students and administration at Syracuse seem to be taking a lot of comfort from the fact that the guy who was stabbed, and the guys in all the other fights (“[The police] received multiple reports of fights breaking out in the concourse areas near the concession stands prior to receiving a report of the stabbing…”), weren’t students, but so what? If your university has created perfect conditions for riots (the event is free and open to the public and being shitfaced is de rigueur), you’re not going to be impervious to the weaponry by virtue of having a student i.d.

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The solution won’t be to change the nature of the event. The event recruits fans who will purchase tickets, and the school needs the money. The solution – a familiar one, adding delight to these free-spirited celebrations – will be to turn the arena into a police state.

More on Cardale Jones the truth-teller:

His tweet, if inartful and perhaps ill-advised, was actually correct on the merits: he was not given a scholarship to play school.

For background, go here.

Football brings so many obvious gifts to universities – broken budgets, academic fraud, a chance to become intimate on a daily basis not only with the local police, but often with the FBI… But there’s a more nuanced sort of gift football offers academic institutions, and this has to do with the atmosphere, the ethos, the gestalt, of these intellectual settings. It involves bringing coaches to campus and giving them the highest salary in the state and allowing them and their staff to impose Stalinist standards on student journalists.

Here are two of many examples of authoritarian coaches trying to shut down a free press at American universities. I mean, of course we know that virtually all university football programs refuse to discuss – or only very selectively discuss – their budgets (Penn State, before it was forced by circumstance to disclose all sorts of things to the world, was notoriously paranoid about any form of disclosure); but here we’re talking about the actual bullying of a free press.

The latest case of this activity – ever so slightly at odds with the nature of universities – has occurred at the University of Kansas, whose football coach is touchy about the fact that he’s doing a wretched job, and who considers campus journalists the functional equivalent of cheerleaders. This post’s title quotes a commenter on an article about the coach’s efforts to intimidate a staffer on the KU newspaper, and indeed the situation is very simple and very familiar from other big-time sports schools: You bully people on the field, you bully people off the field. Name of the game.

The coach tweets his incredulity:

Team slammed by our own school newspaper. Amazing!

Whoever heard of a university newspaper criticizing its own football team?? Amazing! So the coach had his staff tell the reporter he’d better shut up if he wants continued access.

As Deadspin puts it:

Weis is off to a 1-4 start in his first season at KU. Here’s a change in tone, Kansas: The shitty, incompetent coach of your shitty, incompetent football program had his pwecious fweewings hurt by the fucking school newspaper, and in response, your idiot factotum—instead of telling Weis to shut the fuck up and to concentrate on not losing by 40 to State next time—decided to be a smarmy, bullying little PR shit. Way to go, assholes.

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UD thanks Dave.

Poor fellows keep taking gambles.

And damned if they didn’t just take another bad gamble.

I know we’re all supposed to have shifted our filthy-university-sports attention from Binghamton to the University of North Carolina, but Binghamton keeps hogging the limelight.

The most criminalized university in America.

And we haven’t even started talking about the medical school.

Hoo boy. That’ll be the day. Talk about a jockstravaganza! Let’s see… Whoever the president is, we know he’ll be a jock who couldn’t care less about how corrupt and mercenary the relationship is between the NCAA and sports schools. Or hey maybe we want the vice-president to get involved! There’s Paul Bionic Man Ryan… Joe Weight Lifter Biden… They’re all physical fitness freaks, and they’re all mad sports fans… So forget the executive branch.

Senators and congressmen… yeah, they’re going to want to fuck up the comfy relationship between the NCAA and their home teams… They’re going to want to uncover decades of academic fraud back home and berate the NCAA for overlooking it…

… telling the truth. In a student-athlete variation on the Kinsley Gaffe (“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”), Jones, an Ohio State football player, tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Cardale Jones is my hero. He alone speaks the truth through the bullshit of APR scores, and Sociology and Sports Management departments bursting with jockshop courses, and sweet kindly academic counselor ladies who take the boys by the arm and lead them to the courses the ladies will take for them. It’s degrading – to the school, the players, to other students, to everybody. Cardale breaks through the lies and asks an admirably rational question: Why are you making me play school?

It’s why, if you’ve read this blog any length of time, you know that I refer to sports factory personnel as Blanche DuBoises. It’s their job to live in a gaudy gauzy unreality… To lie and lie and lie and even try to believe it all…

When someone firmly based in the reality principle – like Cardale here – comes along, all the Blanches, with a sharp scandalized intake of breath, say Ah declare ah’ve never heard such manner of thing… Lord, lord, lord have mercy…

UD says: Let the Blanches blanch. We know what’s right.

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UD thanks Doug.

So another course – Naval Weapons Systems – has broached the surface at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. We all know about the AFAM courses under Julius Nyang’oro (scroll down), and despite the administration’s insistence that that’s the end of the story, we’ve all been waiting for the rest of the bogus courses to reveal themselves. This one had no tests, no research paper, and was jammed with athletes.

… oh okay the quarterback has a drinking problem… But cast your eye back over these posts (scroll down)… TCU’s got an elaborate student drug cartel going, with football players prominent in the game.

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.

Duh. If you don’t think tons of people knew and happily enabled academic fraud at the University of North Carolina, I have a Thomas Petee independent study to show you.

Nyang’oro came to UNC in 1984 as a visiting assistant professor and became the African studies department’s chairman in 1992. University officials now admit he never received a review from a supervisor since he was elevated to that position …

Deniability is a beautiful thing. Until you can’t deny anymore.

By the way – UD has always been a big fan of online course evaluations. And this story reveals one of the reasons why.

Evidence shows that some non-athletes who enrolled in the classes did so unwittingly and were dumbfounded to find the class only consisted of a paper assignment.

One such student commented about the Spring 2010 AFRI 370 no-show class on a course evaluation website known as Koofers.

“I am taking the course by submitting a paper with Prof. Nyang’oro and it is a bit daunting,” said the student, who was not identified, in a comment posted in April 2010, long before the scandal was uncovered. “It has to be between 20-25 pages. I wish I was able to take the actual course with him.”

Faculty and administrators too hoitsy or whatever to read course evaluations might want to look at them occasionally. Had anyone at UNC bothered, they would have read, a year before the scandal broke, a description of the AFAM fraud.

There’s one other intriguing angle to this story, and I wonder if it’s true of other jockshops. All the tutors mentioned in this article were women. Fraud gals. Fraud fraus. Why? Soft hearts? Easily manipulated?

Just ’cause your point of pride don’t involve steaming piles of shit on campus for days after a game don’t mean our point of pride don’t involve that!

We’re Texas State, and look what we can do!

Texas State: The Rising Smell of Texas.

This student makes some good suggestions, but when your university is basically a football team plus block after city block of bars, you have to expect violence. And all the drunken fights and gunshots the other night were after the University of South Carolina won its game.

Of course you can bear down with incredible numbers of police (the area already has security cameras everywhere), so that in the days following the mobs you arrest some people and try to scare other people — in anticipation of the next game, which is against Georgia. Yeah, you heard that right: Georgia. Get ready to roll.

The 7 p.m. kickoff for the Georgia game will add to his department’s challenge, [the police chief] said. Crowds always are larger and more rowdy after night games because they have been tailgating for hours before the games.

So on the Thursday after the post-victory violence, the police picked up a couple of University of South Carolina students just doing the sort of harmless hijinks you associate with college kids out at night:

The arrests, one for unlawful carrying of a pistol and resisting arrest, the other for hit-and-run and drug possession, follow a particularly violent weekend in Five Points in which two men were injured in mob assaults and a woman’s car was damaged by gunfire after the Gamecocks’ victory over the Missouri Tigers Sept. 22 at Williams-Brice Stadium.

Haha the old unlawful carrying of a pistol and hit and run! Kids today!