Nadal has turned down the University of the Balearic Islands doctorate because of the murky controversy to which its angry president alludes.

What possible basis could there be for a faculty and student body hesitating to award an honorary doctorate to a 27 year old who “left conventional schooling after he turned pro at 15″, and who is famous for “his habit of biting the trophies” he wins?

Mark Cuban has thrown quite a missile into the stupidhappy world of American football. He predicts the greedy NFL, which seems to be moving toward 24/7 televised football games (and what a noble physical spectacle football is; one player, anticipating yet another weekday game being added, says that for him it would be like “getting in a car wreck Sunday then getting hit by a train Thursday.”), will implode in ten years via saturation bombing.

And what (ahem!) are the implications of this possibility for American universities – many of whom are already largely given over, financially and academically, to the game? I mean, in all the responses to Cuban’s argument, no one mentions that it’s not only national saturation via professional football. Most of the people staring at NFL games are also staring at university games… SO much football, my fellow Americans…

Before UD offers an analysis of the higher ed implications of Cuban’s thing, she reminds you that attendance at university games (as well as professional) is down across the country and will probably decline more over the next few years. Even the state god of Alabama has warned the little people they’d better start showing up at games (and staying at games – these university things are televised too, and it looks pathetic when after the first half the stands are empty) or else. Add to this picture continuing huge expenditures for bigger stadiums (Take the University of New Hampshire for a sample of the sort of thinking university administrators are doing on this issue. Its spokesperson explains that “it attracts about 750 students to [its current stadium], which seats about 6,500 but would grow to 10,000 under the new plan. UNH said a new stadium would attract more students to games and to the university as a whole.”), continued high-profile team criminality (Cuban talks about this as a factor in the decline of NFL too), continued reputational damage due to cheating scandals, etc.

Okay, so what should universities do at this point, if Cuban is in any way correct in his description of the future of the game?

If the NFL implodes, someone’s gonna have to be there to pick up the shards of what’s left. When American public opinion is so disgusted with the corruption and greed of professional football that people abandon it, there sits the sweet innocent university, ready to give our people the true unadulterated game again! Football played by uncompensated scholars who play for the love of the game… Who play whenever their academic schedules permit… It’s inspiring, it’s about clean-living, it’s what this country very badly needs. It’s a winner.

Taxpayers subsidize a school in Chapel Hill that embodies the athletic dreams of their great state, and it has always been the responsibility of its board of trustees (The trustee page includes nicknames for each of the trustees. Haywood Cochrane is “Haywood,” Peter Grauer is “Peter,” Kelly Hopkins is “Kelly.”) to retain faculty who understand the foundational values of the institution.

A one-paragraph final paper for a recent course at the mill – a paragraph plagiarized from the first page of a reader designed for third graders – has gone viral and why not. Why the hell not. Its grade was A minus.

People – especially the people footing the bill, which is to say the citizens of North Carolina – have every right to know why they paid for that minus, what the fuck that itty bitty tail is doing trailing that A like some pointless right offensive guard just standing there along the side of things taking up room on the field. Whenever you give a revenue athlete a grade, you’re sending one of two messages: We love you, and ever since we debased ourselves beyond belief to recruit you, our love has only grown; or We take it upon ourselves to judge you. To actually judge you and give you a minus.

Which one will it be, Tar Heels???

Vaunted:

often spoken of or described as very good or great : often praised

Uh, I guess. UD graduated from Northwestern University, but she married a Harvard graduate and … well… you know how that goes. She understands that NU’s intellectual currency and its university-market-hotness (always pretty high) has zoomed forward in the last few years, and she’s happy to hear that.

She herself, a ‘thesdan, knew little of NU’s prestige or whatever when she decided to go there. She went there because she thought she might want to be a journalist, and NU’s school of journalism was a good one. It took a semester for her to realize she didn’t want to be a journalist. After a quick chat about it with Erich Heller (“If you are unhappy doing that, why continue to do that?”), she transferred to the literature department, where she did indeed get a good education, and where she was very happy.

She went to one boring absurd football game which NU lost by (she seems to recall) sixty or so points, and gave no thought to the world of bigtime athletes and whether they were getting said vaunted education.

Years later, she got to thinking about universities as such, and this thing kept sticking in the university’s craw, as it were, this billion dollar revenue sports thing. As in the latest case — Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina — everyone knows you cannot under any circumstances reconcile the vast both-wings billion dollar media conspiracy university football has become with anything other than no college education (the player plays the game, takes no classes, goes pro after a year) or bogus college education (Nyang’oro plus the Academic Assistance Center whores keep the ball rolling).

Everyone’s excited about Northwestern’s players having made progress toward unionization, and of course it is a good thing. Few beyond the truly depraved find the NCAA millionaires and the hapless no ed/bogus ed players anything other than a repellent couple. And with a union the guys will get good medicare care after they bash their brains in. Plus they’re asking for shorter practice hours, the lazy bums.

It’s the practice hours that’s really going to piss off the NCAA, not the medical thing. The whole point is that this is professional football, not wussy college football. Take a look at the University of Oregon’s new practice center, its walls plastered with KILL THE ENEMY propaganda. You have to take the trouble to get to know this culture, I’m saying. There’s no reason it is located on university campuses. It is in fact wholly at odds with universities (drunken tribes cheering on violent bulk smashing up against violent bulk – not exactly the life of the mind, kiddies). Recall life at Nebraska and Oregon when Mr Football, Richie Incognito, studied at those schools. As long as sports factories who don’t give a flying fuck about educating the bulk keep the practice hours long, other schools aren’t going to shorten them.

What I’m trying to say is that, union or not, you can’t make it work. University football is always going to be the same. It’s always going to be disgusting and it’s always going to destroy universities. It makes too many icky people too rich.

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This, by the way, on our rapidly onlining colleges and universities, is what’s left (what may soon be left) of face-to-face, in person experience on campus. Hulk v. Hulk.

… was the last headline on this blog under the subject heading University of South Florida. At pathetically sports-obsessed, disablingly restless, mentally challenged USF it’s all about hiring and firing coaches… Hire, fire, hire, fire, hire, fire. They fired their last football coach because the head of the board of trustees texted the president from the stadium as a losing game came to an end that he found what he was just forced to undergo “disgusting and unacceptable.”

You pick up on the rage, on the intensity of this, no? … You pick up on the need of this man to talk with medical professionals about why he finds the end of a football game so personally unmanageable that he has to, right away, right away, tell mommy about how it’s all so disgusting. Mommy has to know right now that I’m finding this disgusting! Where’s Mommy. GET MOMMY. It’s like Bloom in this scene from The Producers – take blanky away and he’ll have a meltdown.

This is USF – this is the head of their board of trustees. This is why USF is all about overpaid severances, and buyouts, of dumped coaches – the latest of which is their basketball coach:

[He] received a contract extension in July 2012 and was fired with four years remaining on his deal, leaving USF liable for a $1.5 million buyout payment.

Then there’s the tens of thousands of dollars USF just spent on a search firm to tell them that this guy’s replacement lied on his resume about having graduated from college.

I mean, fine. You’re a university. What’s money for?

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UD thanks M, a reader.

… Georgia-style.

Regular televised “exposés” of the already fully exposed academic reality of big-time sports schools (the latest such broadcast is available for viewing on Tuesday, when HBO will tell you what you already know about what universities do to keep many of their revenue-sports players academically eligible) will, UD has long predicted on this blog, eventually disappear. Eventually most sports factories will make their head football coaches president of the university (Jim Tressel’s a candidate at Akron, from which he’ll make a move back to Ohio State; I think Nick Saban or one of his assistant coaches will be Alabama’s next president, etc.). The idea is a no-brainer: When you’ve got even a vaguely respectable academic at the helm, she’ll have enormous difficulty dealing with the SAT cheating, the fake classes, the hilariously named academic advising centers (“[A]cademic advising centers “operate as ‘schools within schools’ and are responsible for enabling student-athletes with elementary educations to graduate from big-time universities.”), and all the rest. But once it’s clear that your university really is just a sports factory, there’s no scandal to expose. The curriculum is all sports-specific; the trustees and administration are all former college athletes; there’s not a scintilla of pretense to intellectual activity, let alone intellectual respectability. It’s the wave of the future. It’s the only way to go.

Kind of a defensive headline, that. Why, when sleazeman Bobby Petrino (put “petrino” in my search engine) has again (this is a return gig) graced the University of Louisville not only with his presence, but with open practices, is everybody staying away?

[L]ess than [Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Make that Fewer than] 100 fans were on hand for Petrino’s first open practice inside Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium.

Do you have any idea what one hundred people look like in a stadium built for 55,000 people?

… who cynically and with arrant disregard recruit violent and troubled men to their campuses and then make them sports heroes until they kill someone… UD is fascinated by the ways these universities do damage control. It’s especially intriguing to watch, er, repeat offenders deal with the body count.

Take nice little University of Maine. A pleasant inoffensive sort of place, except that their coaches are really unlucky in love. Jovan Belcher, and now “[Zedric] Joseph is the second former UMaine football player in just over a year to be linked to a murder.” Yes, two in a row, and of course in both cases there was evidence – in their pre-college past, and in their college behavior – that they were dangerous people. But, you know, exposing your undergraduates to people like Belcher and Joseph is all part of the game. Students at the University of Nebraska knew that risking standing in a line behind Richie Incognito was the price you paid for winning games. It’s all part of winning games.

But okay let’s see how you mop up the mess if you’re U Maine. First, as Deadspin’s Sean Newell points out, you take a page from Joseph Stalin’s book and unperson him. You just rub him out. You literally – as Yeshiva did with trustee Bernard Madoff – erase him from all real and virtual university surfaces. What… Belcher? Who…?

Almost one year to the day after he shot and killed his girlfriend before driving to the Kansas City Chiefs’ facility where he shot and killed himself in front of his coach and general manager, Jovan Belcher is no longer on the banner.

You know, the banner. The BIG banner that hangs in U Maine stadium boasting about their guys now in the NFL.

Newell then notes some of the guys still on the banner:

… Maine and Steelers lineman Justin Strzelczyk … drove 15 miles of a 40-mile high speed chase on three wheels, flipping off and throwing beer bottles at state troopers along the way. The chase, which began because of a hit and run, ended when he sped into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with a tanker, killing him instantly.

Strzelczyk, 6 feet 6 inches and 300 pounds, was a monstrous presence on the Steelers’ offensive line from 1990-98. He was known for his friendly, banjo-playing spirit and gluttony for combat. He spiraled downward after retirement, however, enduring a divorce and dabbling with steroid-like substances, and soon before his death complained of depression and hearing voices from what he called “the evil ones.”

It was later determined Strzelczyk’s showed signs of CTE.

Among the less-troubled on the banner are Stephen Cooper, Lofa Tatupu and Daren Stone. Cooper, a former San Diego Charger, was found holding 1,000 anabolic steroid pills during a traffic stop while at UMaine. He was later suspended four games by the NFL when he tested positive for ephedra. Both Lofa Tatupu and Daren Stone had their own minor scrapes with the law and were charged with DUIs.

The other classic response ingredients (this goes on at all schools where this sort of thing happens) involve focusing on

1. the shock and anguish of the coaches (How could anyone have seen this coming? They were like sons to me. etc.)

2. the tragic loss to the team’s win record (Defense is going to have trouble recovering from this absence from the lineup…)

3. the tragic nature of life in general (the school’s most articulate and sad-faced administrator blinks in front of the cameras and talks of the essential wounded enigma of being as such)

4. the remarkable compassion and competence of the school’s mental health professionals as they rush to deal with traumatized students

5. the way this has made the school a stronger place by bringing us all together through adversity.

Yes, yes, that’s how it’s gone, and no one’s surprised that John Junker, someone affiliated with universities and their use of public money, is now routinely referred to as a “kingpin.”

Criminal, university-affiliated, public money gangs being what they are, we shouldn’t expect only game fixing, gun violence, DUIs, theft of public funds for running decades-long pretend-class scams, and all the other low-level stuff to be the only news we get out of big-time university sports in America, the place where Richie Incognito got his education. We should also expect, at the highest level, at the level of the most powerful men in college football, to hear about bribing politicians, breaking campaign finance laws, diverting millions of dollars of public funds for strip clubs and all that other sex stuff that Nevin Shapiro made even more famous than it already was. As all of these guys will explain to you if you’ll only sit down and listen, there’s a certain culture associated with university football, see… A certain world that’s being admitted to the country’s universities… And coaches and boosters and university presidents (here’s looking at you, Graham Spanier) have to play to it.

Junker will go to jail for a bit, but don’t make no nevermind.

“There’s something about [the] society [of other people] and useful short-term distractions that takes your mind off [the fear of death],” remarks Julian Barnes, author of a whole book about the fear of death.

UD thinks that the people of Allen, Texas have much to teach us in this regard, having produced a gigantic, expensive, communal, engrossing distraction in their sixty million dollar high school football stadium that, two years after construction, has had to be shut down because of structural flaws.

One needs to look past the cruel verdict by one observer (see my headline) in this article’s comment thread and instead appreciate – even marvel at – the way an entire town has figured out how to do an end run around the whole timor mortis conturbat me thing by creating a massive unsound edifice around which the town will be able to rally and fight and pray for decades to come.

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Centuries from now The Allen Stadium will have become the state’s sphinx, its obelisk, its omphalos, its ultima thule, around which, in seasonal rituals, people will gather and chant Who built this? Why?

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UD thanks John.

Fine Arts and Rat Feces at Louisiana State University.

… When the ceramics studio ceiling crashed into a large sink that just about every student in the building uses, people around campus started paying attention to the [Studio Arts] building’s long list of issues. Problems with the building, which was constructed in 1924, date back much further and are not limited to that one studio.

One of students’ biggest concerns is lead paint and asbestos they have identified throughout the building using home test kits.

… There is exposed wiring throughout the building, some of which is near students’ lockers in the main hallway. When the ceiling leaks — which it often does in many places — students fear the mix of electricity and water and avoid going to their lockers.

Restrooms are not cleaned regularly and rat feces often appear throughout the building, [a student] said.

“I haven’t seen Facility Services in here until the ceiling collapsed,” she said. “Once we started the protest stuff, then we started seeing them here and there. … We’re only starting to get attention now that we’re speaking out about it.”

… At various times, the Studio Arts Building has been home to squirrels, rats, a raccoon and during summer 2013, a homeless man, she said.

“The shabbiness draws random people to it,” [a student] said.

… [On the up side, the building is] brimming with the kind of quirkiness that only art students could come up with… Someone drew the outline of a house around a hole in a wall where a rat that students named Leroy once lived.

Go, Rats! I mean, Tigers.

UD has said it before and she says it again: There are few nuttier locations in this country than Penn State’s Happy Valley.

… poll? What’s its secret?

Well, it’s a matter of priorities. Look at its public university system.

[I]t’s hard to find $900 million for a 60,000-seat domed college football stadium for a program that has had a winning record once in the last 13 years and resorted to giving away tickets for free to get people to go to its last home opener.

Sure it’s hard. Sure! No one ever said life was easy. But the state of Nevada knows what matters, and UD is sure it will devote millions of dollars to this initiative.

And anyway you can’t say Nevada students don’t care about basketball! The other night, UNLV’s student body president got so excited he got thrown out of a game!!

“I was the leader of our group,” said [Mark] Ciavola, a 39-year-old political science major and the campaign manager for Nevada Rep. Joe Heck, R-Las Vegas.

“If you feel you have to escort someone out, you escort the leader, but multiple people on both sides were yelling and gesturing,” he said. “None of the [University of Nevada, Reno] fans were ejected for throwing things at us, but perhaps no one saw that.”

More detail from Ciavola:

… Ciavola had tried to lead a group of about 50 UNLV fans around the perimeter of the court to chant “Rebels,” something he had done at last year’s game between the two teams.

He said they were stopped by a security guard or police officer who told them to return to the bleachers or they all would be thrown out of the game.

‘We went back to our seats, but as UNR starting tying up the game things really got heated and the entire stadium started chanting “F— the Rebels,’” Ciavola said. “The section in front of us was flipping us off and throwing things at us – a water bottle and crushed up paper — and finally we gestured back at them.”

UD is enjoying following the latest Salvation Stadium story. In an earlier post, UD quoted a spokesperson at the University of New Hampshire using impeccable logic in defense of millions the university’s president wants to spend on a stadium expansion at a time when fewer and fewer university students around the country are attending football games, and when, at UNH in particular, almost no one attends:

UNH said it attracts about 750 students to Cowell Stadium, which seats about 6,500 but would grow to 10,000 under the new plan. UNH said a new stadium would attract more students to games and to the university as a whole.

Now the president himself has emerged to explain to the local paper why this is a great idea, a win/win for UNH, and there’s yet more impeccable logic.

There’s his statement in my headline: Since we’re obviously going to make big bucks on this idea (thousands of students will flock to the games because…), don’t you worry your pretty little head about our repaying the whopping loan we’re going to take out.

And if that’s not enough to convince you – twenty years ago we built another athletic facility and some people were opposed but now everybody really likes it!

“But it now has become a beloved fixture not only on our campus but arguably for the whole state. And I think the same thing will happen when the stadium gets renovated.”

And if you’re still not convinced, remember how we all peed our pants ’cause we got to some semi-final?

“I think the kind of excitement that I felt around here this fall when (the Wildcats football team) was making that incredible run to the semi-finals was palpable throughout the entire state,” Huddleston said.

Once we spend $25 million on a bigger stadium, get ready to pee your pants every day!