Ever wonder what these departments look like? Here’s the one Chase Garnham’s talking about.

There is a required internship for all HOD majors.

UD would be interested in knowing how the football players satisfied this requirement, since Garnham seems to be saying that they barely had time to take HOD classes, let alone do an internship. Similarly, how many of the football players’ HOD classes were online? Independent studies?

… Ellen Staurowsky?”

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

Ellen: And you want to know the clincher?

NCAA: NO! NO! NO! NO! … You will not say this!

Ellen: The hell I won’t.

NCAA: I’LL KILL YOU… YOU SATANIC BITCH!

Your morning giggle.

Oh, plus there are lots of regular, non-student, empty seats.

Yes, TCF Stadium, when the University of Minnesota made its case to hit up state taxpayers and students for it, was going to be such a big deal, such a big success…

Since the 50,800-seat stadium opened in 2009, the number of student season-ticket holders has dropped from 10,248 to 4,953 last year.

Oh and we’ve been treated, since the opening of this pathetic hole, to the entire panoply of excuses – no alcohol (they fixed that), the team loses sometimes, heavy traffic, it’s really a commuter school (but TCF Stadium was going to strengthen the campus community!), bad WiFi, competition from tv…

Hey. Did anybody mention all of that while people were discussing whether they wanted to spend everyone’s money on a huge new stadium?

Did anybody talk to any students?

… [W]hen I arrived at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2005, I didn’t identify myself as a Gopher. I came to study and get my degree, not to frolic in the flamboyance of our college sports teams and most certainly not to fund a $288.5 million TCF Bank Stadium. Yet this was an identity that was forced upon me. It was built into my tuition. It was assumed, because I lived within the University community, that of course I was a Gophers football fan and that I would have no qualms about chipping in for the sake of sport. It is a ridiculous and insulting assumption … We should be fighting for the separation of university life from collegiate sports. … Yes, TCF Bank Stadium has already been built, but we still have time to rethink the future of university sports. The recession affords us the opportunity to look critically at the institutions we have designed, modify them and maybe even start over…

OTOH, that separation she’s talking about is definitely happening. Professional coach, professional players, professional stadium, almost exclusively non-students in the stands… It’s happening!

Hell, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot. They do that, and the professional-league coaches, Saban on down, will bolt as their several million dollars a year salaries plummet. Right now, the highest paid public employee in most states is a college coach. That will start to change if you go the Mike Slive route.

… UD will go ahead and make it again. The most corrupt states have, with a few exceptions, the most pathetic public university systems. Here’s the list:

1. Mississippi
2. Louisiana
3. Tennessee
4. Illinois
5. Pennsylvania
6. Alabama
7. Alaska
8. South Dakota
9. Kentucky
10. Florida

Think too of how many of these lucky finalists boast corrupt big-time sports programs, with Penn State lately leading the pack, of course.

But Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and Florida are also University Diaries perennials.

… swaggers through the squalor of capitalism and ends up smelling like a rose.

Il tutor di tutti tutori breaks through the whole pathetic Mary Willingham I’m here to teach them something bit into the light of nasty brutish short. Yes, he helped squads of university athletes cheat, and he couldn’t be happier.

They liked that I swore a lot and didn’t give a fuck. Eventually, I became the go-to tutor for jocks… And helping [them] cheat the system didn’t seem any more unethical than forcing some kid to learn about how great capitalism is… [The] argument that the athletes I helped cheat were taking advantage of public tax dollars is a moot point when you consider how much [their] coaches are paid… Our education system is just one giant hustle — and if you ain’t hustling, you’re getting hustled… I don’t see a problem with student athletes cheating. As far as I can tell, that’s the American way.

There are many possible responses to endemic cheating among our big time university sports programs. There’s indifference, anger, amusement, protest rallies, petitions, withholding of student fees, going to the press with what you know, writing about what you know, etc. Adding to the corruption because The World is Shit is pretty much the worst possible response.

… as she read (and listened to) this visiting law professor at way-past-hopeless West Virginia University complain about the school spending $75 million to upgrade its football stadium. As another WVU professor explains:

[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

The important part of that statement is the beginning: In America today, the party school is a business, and WVU is America’s number one party school.

Anyone trying to introduce changes to that business model is excuse me but kind of a fool.

The only thing that changes this business model is un p’tit peu too much rape and pillage, and then things only change for as long as it takes to clean up the lawsuits and probations and all. Then it starts up again.

So who is this Michael Blumenthal who gets on the local airwaves and says

I have to admit that I hold to the now antiquated belief that universities are for education, not sports; that the most important people on a university campus are the students, not the football players, and that the main purpose of large amounts of spare change is to do things for those who need it most, and have it least.

He can’t be the poet Michael Blumenthal, because he’s a poet and not a law professor…

OTOH, the poet Blumenthal is also notorious — for having written another futile protest, this one against the love me do ethos of many creative writing programs. In a 2001 letter to his students at Santa Clara University (he was there for a visiting gig), he wrote that often their writing instructors simply flattered them in order to get good course evaluations:

You have been neither loved nor nurtured. You have, rather, been lied to and betrayed. Though the mother’s milk that flows from such breasts may temporarily satisfy your ravenous appetites for praise (and its donors’ hunger for tenure), it is not, I assure you, a very nourishing brew. You have been told that the not good is good, that the unworthy is the worthy.

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

… But yes! Turns out the WVU Blumenthal is the Santa Clara Blumenthal. This restless, interdisciplinary man has taught all over the world and has lately landed in one of the weirdest campuses in America, a truly anti-intellectual funhouse.

UD admires Blumenthal’s willingness to open himself to hostility, incomprehension, and indifference; but surely he knows no one’s listening.

… at Chapel Hill.

It’s true that investigations require withholding facts and that federal privacy laws limit what can be said about student records. It’s also true that the university system president and the UNC-CH chancellor can’t respond to every allegation. Folt and Ross are following the advice of university lawyers. But when the university is hit by allegations as strong and high-profile as those coming from McCants, leaders can’t take refuge behind lawyers and investigators.

This is when leaders step forward, address the public and answer questions. That imperative is particularly strong for leaders of a public university who must uphold the public trust with more than constrained silence and appeals for patience.

It makes a lot of noise when accusations of sexual assault come out of the Ivy League, especially when the accused are football players. The Brown University story is rapidly getting national coverage.

On the other hand, it took newspapers ages to notice what was going on at the University of Montana, where things have gotten so bad that “UM officials concede the controversy [over reported incidents and the university’s response to them] contributed to the school’s enrollment drop.” That drop in enrollment – a very big drop – has continued since the story began to break in 2012. It doesn’t help that UM is featured in the opening paragraphs of a Time article about campus rape.

Life of the mind, United States of America, 2014.

Allow UD to speak for university professors in saying how thrilled we are — after Eric Cantor’s loss to a professor, which sets up a congressional contest in Virginia between a professor and another professor — that you like us!

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Dig: “[T]he House majority leader may have lost his seat because he made a mistake in presuming that Americans hate college professors more than professional politicians.”

!!!!!!!!!

Brat’s syllabus for “The Ends of Economic Justice” lists God as the author of the Bible. (I’ll wager God’s not receiving royalties.) Sales aren’t everything though. Sadly, like Plato and Aristotle, the omnipotent deity is merely suggested reading; the required textbook is by none other than Brat himself. Well, it is an economics class.

… court time is for everybody!

At Chapel Hill, whether you’re a celebrated, veteran professor, or a just-minted freshman, whether you’re in court for criminal fraud or felony larceny, you’re part of the special family of cheaters, liars, and thieves that is the public face of UNC.

Roger Noll, a retired Stanford economist, touches on one of the most notorious aspects of university sports during his testimony at the O’Bannon trial. Noll calls it inefficient substitution.

UD calls it Hail Saban Prince of Darkness.

The coach of a Chicago public high school whose basketball team won and then forfeited the city championship asks, reasonably enough, why his particular school should have to take the fall for the failure of the entire Chicago public school system to keep player eligibility records.

[T]he school district is missing most of the paperwork required to show team and player eligibility, documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show. The district ignored initial requests for the data and later released it.

UD‘s favorite part of this story is the location chosen for the championship game: Chicago State University (scroll down).

Talk about a cosmic convergence!