Higher education news, West Virginia.

It was seven. Now it’s eight. Eight football players under arrest, and that’s just the tally for the month of October. Let’s review:

Two charged with intent to riot and a raft of other stuff.

Six charged with assault.

Most big football universities play by what UD calls the Richie Incognito Rule:

It’s always worth exposing your student body to danger if you can recruit a good player.

Florida State. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Penn State. Certain schools stand out from the crowd.

… Where’s the team when it’s Nine Ten Eleven?
How do we get on the comeback trail?
Who plays ball when they’re all in jail?

Ya gotta envy their coach, though. He’s the functional equivalent of the laptop lecturer (see post just below). Both are getting paid to work with groups that aren’t there.

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UD thanks Veblen.

… is at it again.

Must be really weird being a cheerleader there.

Keep that third one in mind: most athletic. Read this article about sororities and add to an undergraduate woman’s non-academic time commitments participation in one or more university teams. Get the picture?

These dedicated men and women worked tirelessly in the courtroom and together formed an ironclad defense that will be remembered for generations to come. Just as importantly, throughout their time here, they remained equally committed to the ideals and core values of Penn State.

Honoring Penn State’s finest.

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UD thanks Wendy.

So here’s where the ethos of the serious university hits up against a perfectly reasonable question from a person outside the university.

The greatest damage UNC’s corruption has done is not to its students’ degrees (despite all the coverage and hoo-hah, no one cares about what happened at UNC, and they won’t look at its graduates’ degrees any differently than they did before), but to the American university as such.

Why? Go back to those empty classrooms nobody noticed. Of course many people did notice; but they were in on the game. What about everyone else?

Serious American universities, like the American economy, ultimately run on trust. They are special places in part because there isn’t anyone racing around checking to see if you’re meeting your class. The assumption at serious universities is that faculty obviously meet their classes. It is that kind of community. It is a serious place full of serious people, both students and faculty.

UNC isn’t a serious university anymore (it can become one again); at UNC, in the wake of the scandal, all professors are subject to spot checks. At UNC

administrators are making surprise inspections in class to make sure courses are actually taking place.

You’re in the army now, fella! Sheets on tight? Maybe I’ll just burst in on you some afternoon…

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That is why no one noticed the empty classrooms. No one was looking. Everyone was trusting that a tenured professor, the chair of a department, a researcher in a recognized field, would – duh! – meet his classes. Are you kidding me?

UNC has fucked it up for all of us, especially those sentenced to life at a sports factory. Because now that the lid has fallen off UNC, it’s going to fall off a lot of other schools. Don’t forget that a critical mass of these absurdity-based institutions has been growing: Exactly the same academic hoax has been reported on at Auburn, SUNY Binghamton, etc. Everyone knows that a variant of the UNC scheme operates at virtually all of the big-time sports schools, and now that we’re paying attention, we can expect dozens of other unshocking revelations from other campuses.

The UNC thing goes straight to the heart of what distinguishes universities from all other institutions, all other workplaces. The university is an odd creature, a rare thing. Bartlett Giamatti called it “a free and ordered space.” Get it? Free and ordered?

It’s also a delicate thing. Our friends from the southland have really done a number on it.

There’s too much deflection out there already and a pervasive, practiced defensiveness that’s without even a whiff of contrition.

What’s essentially behind that response: Everyone does it. We just got caught.

The “everybody does it” sentiment is so widely held when it comes to academic fraud and big-time college athletics that it’s almost impossible for any individual instance to shock or even register with the national public anymore. It doesn’t matter that UNC athletes received a collective GPA of 3.61 in their “paper” classes and a 1.91 in their “real” ones; this isn’t the type of cheating that grabs attention these days. Show us some money changing hands or a star player getting caught stealing something funny from an easily mockable location. Give us something we can turn into a joke that will make our co-workers laugh.

Eventually this country will begin ranking colleges exclusively in terms of how academic their sports scandals are. The more scholarly content in the scandal, the higher the college’s academic rating.

… FAMU is like any other American university.

[A lawyer for the defense in the Florida A&M marching band hazing/manslaughter trial noted that] students at the University of Florida have organized “Tough Mudder” teams for a competition so demanding and hazardous that participants are required to sign a “death waiver.” He also noted that University of Central Florida students have volunteered to compete in the “Warrior Dash,” an obstacle race that includes a crawl through a tent known as the “Poop House.”

… two months.”

Look sharp, lads! At schools like yours, the two-month number is usually closer to ten.

When there’s a university in your midst, it so heightens the tone.

The Morgantown Police Dept. ordered equipment and supplies officers would need to better control a crowd or riot in the future. The inventory, which totals $28,209.13, includes riots shields, smoke rounds, pepper spray cans and pepper balls, gas masks and equipment needed to release pepper balls into a crowd.

Who came up with the idea putting the word “University” together with “West Virginia” in the first place?

At the two minute mark on Weekend Update, University of North Carolina students defend themselves.

Al Sharpton on the people who run the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

He’s got a point. Sports/money types exploiting black athletes.