So pathetic, what’s happened to the American university. One prominent lawyer consults another about how to run a university and this is what he’s told.

UD was amused, later in the Inside Higher Ed account of The Passion of Ken Starr and (according to reports) The Impending Martyrdom Of The Athletic Department, to read that Baylor’s orgiastic adoration of football “has concerned some on campus, who worry that a university so focused on football could lose sight of its Baptist mission.” Don’t they understand what everyone else understands? That there’s no light between Football and Faith?

Oh beautiful Starr the hope of light
Guiding the players through their indict
All through the courts ’till break of dawn
Into the land of Next Game Day
He does give out a lovely ray
Oh beautiful Starr of Baylor shine on

When Baylor was winning football games and no one in a position of authority had yet been booted out because of arrant indifference to sexual assault, one of the trustees described life on campus as “like an early rapture.” What will the people of Baylor do now that other teams are lifted up and they remain behind in Tribulation?

UD‘s advice: Win some football games.

How I wonder what you are
Are you in or are you out?
What is Baylor’s board about?
Twinkle twinkle little Starr
How I wonder what you are.

***********

UD thanks Van.

A Texas writer grapples with the philosophical implications of Baylor’s conscience-of-a-nation president, the man who had WHAT to say about Bill Clinton’s fellatio with a White House intern, now clammin’ right up when it comes to his football players. Title of the writer’s article:

Ken Starr, Full Monty on Fellatio 18 Years Ago, All Shy Now About Baylor Rapes

When Lewinsky describes the sex she had back then, she says it happened because “I fell in love with my boss.”

When scads of Baylor women describe the sex they recently had, with members of the football team, they don’t talk about love. They just go straight to the police reports.

[Ken] Starr .. wanted to make fellatio a national issue … And now that Starr is president of a Baptist university, he and the regents of his school are cloaking themselves in legalisms and claims of privacy on the arguably much more urgent question of serial campus rape.

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To jog your memory:

Starr, whose main claim to fame at Baylor has been beefing up the football team and building a new stadium, now has two star players in prison for rape, a third about to be tried, another player expelled, a fraternity president arrested and charged. This occurs against a backdrop of foot-dragging on federally mandated anti-rape measures and a pattern of stony silence roundly decried by national and Texas media including even the university’s hometown newspaper, The Waco Tribune.

The Silence of the Starrs. We’ve had a lot of that, haven’t we? Brings to mind that Edgar Lee Masters poem…

I have known the silence of the Starrs and of their teams,
And the silence of the buck when it’s passed,
And the silence of the AD and the Assistant AD,
And the silence for which juries alone find the word,
And the silence of trustees before football season begins,
And the silence of boosters …

… the law school.

Baylor University:

[A] nationally-ranked football powerhouse that can be classified as anything but Christian: a program that has developed into a nightmare of criminality engulfing the entire school community…

[We are following] the horrific news that has been spilling out of Waco, Texas regarding the overall tone and personality of the football program and the despicable actions of an inordinate [number] of their players over the years…

[Baylor features] an accepted culture of severe criminal behavior, sexual assaults and rapes …

[Baylor’s football coach] willingly and purposely recruited some terrible characters who he, his staff, the university and the local police department allowed to run amok while terrorizing a community.

There is the marauding horde at the city’s Christian university, Baylor:

There have been altercations, sexual assaults, hidden police reports and no discipline. Everybody is in on it, trying to keep the football gravy trainrolling unimpeded by pesky justice for victims of the Bears’ marauding horde.

And there is the marauding horde at the city’s breastaurant:

Sunday’s fight escalated to include knives and firearms as gang members fired at each other in the Twin Peaks parking lot, police said, adding that nine suspected gang members died and 170 were arrested.

If you’re a diner or a shopper or a university student, try to stay out of their way. Now that the state of Texas is open carry, this should become easier. The marauding hordes are now likely to be displaying their weaponry.

If you’re a student and would like to study amid the bike engines, gunshots, police sirens, and screams of the dying, UD recommends earbuds.

And and and and and… You’ve got to string together a lot of ands to describe campus life at Baylor University.

… as the women on Seattle’s city council have discovered. They voted against a proposal to build a new basketball arena in the city, and the reaction to that decision helps you understand why so many once-respectable American universities (Rutgers, Chapel Hill, Penn State, Minnesota, Louisville) have allowed the culture of professional sports to turn them into national jokes.

You need to drill down to the trustees (feast your eyes on this photo), to people like the King of Oklahoma State University, to understand how it’s gotten so bad on so many American campuses that a few people are beginning to notice. You have to focus in on people like Jason Feldman, a Seattle attorney who, along with quite a few other men in Seattle, uncorked his rage against – let’s see – what did he call them – the whoring pieces of trash on the council who blocked his basketball fun.

How did it come to this? I mean how did the American university come to this? How do you get to a university that for more than thirty years harbored and adulated a child rapist? A university that for twenty years implemented an elaborate, completely bogus curriculum? A university that was running a whorehouse? You get there by putting in charge people who share the enthusiasms of Jason Feldman Esq.

A university president who doesn’t know the difference between incredible and incredulous.

$95 million in legal payouts (so far) can put a real crimp in your proofreader budget.

Your father keeps a brothel. Your best buddy lost his job because he drinks too much and tells random women to let him go down on them. The terrible team you coach keeps losing players due to sex crimes. If you’re Minnesota’s Richard Pitino, you’re going to want desperately to get the hell off campus – pronto – at the drop of a hat. And that’s what your fleet of private planes, paid for by the good people of that state, is for. (They also recently paid for the football stadium. They are very very good.) That’s why you’re always flying away.

Gophers men’s basketball coach Richard Pitino has spent twice as much on private jet travel as his contract allows since arriving at Minnesota — doubling his budget in his first season, and tripling it his second season… Pitino spent $116,041 on private jet usage in fiscal year 2014 (spanning June 2013 to June 2014) and $156,440 for fiscal 2015. … [As] of February, Pitino had already spent $53,388 on private jet usage for fiscal year 2016. During [a] three-year period, Pitino also took two private jet flights that were “unallowable” because they were less than 200 miles from campus.

Less than 200 miles? Whatever. Gotta get it up.

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

Best headline so far:

Report: Richard Pitino Overspent Private Jet Allowance With Permission Of Sexually Harassing Ex-AD

Big-time university sports: You stay classy.

[T]he then-president of Florida State University was hired in 2014 to run [post-Sandusky Penn State] — right as The New York Times was faulting his administration for improperly handling rape allegations against FSU’s then-star quarterback Jameis Winston. (Around the same time, Penn State was bringing in a new football coach, James Franklin, whose actions in a rape case against four of his players at Vanderbilt were also raising questions. Neither Barron nor Franklin were formally charged with wrongdoing but … is this really the post-Sandusky look that Penn State is going for?)

It’s not as though a football powerhouse university can pick and choose. When your school is essentially playing professional football, you get to enjoy all the benefits of that culture at its most aggressive. What sort of university presidents and coaches do you think are going to show up at Penn State? Especially now, as it once again goes into deep-indignation mode that anyone would give it a hard time because of its long association with Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno.

Made out of words taken from a newspaper article.

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

THREE DAYS INTO MAY

All of this is no more than mere footnote;
Quite good for schadenfreude but little more.
Yet cast your gaze a little farther west…
Oxford! Where finer scandals lie in store.

Carrying on the legacy of the late lamented Norwood Teague, UM’s finest continue leading with their dicks. Sexual assault, sexual harassment, sex videos – the real tragedy is that none of this cockplay seems to be helping the basketball team’s win/loss record. If beating women doesn’t bulk up team confidence, what good is it?

His worshipful masses were sure no
Taint wafted up to Paterno
But then things got real
Jerry lodged an appeal
Happy Valley’s become an inferno

… ’70’s Show.

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

… Sandusky did terrible things to children, and even after hearing that Sandusky was discovered in the shower with a boy of about 10, Paterno didn’t call the police. He didn’t seek to have Sandusky barred from Penn State’s athletic facilities, or apparently even question his assistant about what he had been told, even though the two men had been colleagues for decades.