A Penn State person shares her scandal-wisdom with UVa.
I’m fine with this except for the writer’s suggestion that coaches, of all people, are unequipped to handle criminal investigations.
If university football coaches aren’t equipped to handle criminal investigations, who is?
Doesn’t experience count for anything?
More commentary on “rapey” (new one on me) University of Virginia, in The American Conservative, in which the author quotes a UVa sociologist —
UVA may be to fraternities what Boston was to the Catholic Church.
— and then goes on to elaborate (he covered the church scandal) the ways in which this analogy is correct.
The first case I wrote about, back in 2001, involved an immigrant teenager who was passed around priests in a Bronx parish. When the boy’s father learned what happened, he went to see an auxiliary bishop. According to the victim’s lawyer, the auxiliary bishop allegedly pulled out a checkbook and offered a payout in exchange for the father signing a paper giving the Archdiocese of New York’s attorneys the right to handle his case. The father may have been a laborer and an immigrant, but he knew a scam when he saw it. He left and hired his own lawyer.
And here we see the University of Virginia following a similar script.
He means your basic cover up / keep it in-house M.O.
I don’t understand the attraction of college Greek life… Too rapey. I do not want my kids, as college students, to be subject to rape, to participate in rape, or to be in a position in which they are pressured to prove their loyalty to their fraternity, their friends, and their university by staying silent about rape.
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Overheard from a recent campus tour guide.
‘Near our Jefferson statue all drapey
Live our buck naked frat boys all rapey.
The contrast is striking
And quite to the liking
Of writers from Reuters to AP.’
… UVrApe. It’s by UD’s friend, Scott Jaschik, at Inside Higher Ed.
… also suspends all fraternities.
But what are you going to do? Fraternities are designed for drinking and fucking. Riots and rapes are the totally unsurprising results.
Forget the routine sado-masochistic theater of hazing. That’s a trifle here.
But it’s your culture. If you’re UVa or WVU or Dartmouth or Arizona or whatever, it’s who you are. You won’t be able to suspend them for long.
Unconvinced? Look at the way Florida State and Penn State have responded, en masse, to their outrageous sports scandals. Look at entire local cultures, really, composed of journalists and police and lawyers and trustees and alumni designed to let sports-related miscreants do whatever they want to do. Penn State students rioted when their rapist-enabling coach was let go. Florida State students blocked the latest New York Times account of their foul football team. There’s nothing to be done with such places. Really nothing, beyond what people have done with notorious rape campuses like the University of Montana. They think twice about sending their daughters there.
Nothing to be done except this.
This school has been knocked around very badly in the last few years: the lacrosse murder, the attempted trustee takeover. It is currently dealing with a number of suicides, the murder of Hannah Graham, the Rolling Stone article about a gang-raping fraternity there, and, most recently, a violent response to that article:
An anonymous letter submitted to various news organizations claims responsibility for the vandalism of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house which occurred early Thursday morning.
The letter was submitted via email shortly after 4 p.m. Thursday by “John Doe” at the email address [email protected].
The vandalism came as a response to a Rolling Stone article published online Wednesday which detailed an instance of gang rape which allegedly occurred at the fraternity house in Sept. 2012.
This is an insane amount, all at once, for any university administration to deal with; and there’s plenty of evidence that UVa’s administration has been, historically, denialist, and, it seems, only marginally competent.
By the way, UD wants to suggest that group attacks on fraternity buildings should not surprise us. Indeed we should probably prepare for more.
Predatory, odious, our next president, and currently dealing with his namesake university being dragged through the mud, first by the New York Attorney General, and now by a judge:
This week, a judge found Donald Trump liable for operating a get-rich-quick school, the erstwhile Trump University, without a license. The case was originally brought against Trump by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office, which, according to the Daily News, alleged that Trump University had “ripped off 5,000 students nationwide by promising to make them rich when instead they were steered into costly and mostly useless seminars.”
While he’s already been held liable for the university’s operation, Trump will now go to trial to see if he’s also liable for defrauding the students.
Can’t wait for the trial.
A townsperson’s comment on this year’s local Pumpkin Fest – a traditional event in the small town of Keene New Hampshire, where residents display carved pumpkins and celebrate the beautiful New England autumn together – could also stand as the motto of Keene State University, a very dangerous American location whose rioting students turn everything – including the Keene New Hampshire Pumpkin Fest – into insanity.
Keene State enjoyed a spot of fame when a man who barely survived teaching journalism there for a few years wrote, post-traumatically, The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It. Last weekend’s riot – pretty much unsurpassed, in the annals of college riots, for violence, injury, and destruction – can have surprised no one who, like UD, read Craig Brandon’s account of the gruesome brew that is Keene State. His book of course reviews the long history of student riots there. A sample:
[T]here were dangerous riots when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 and 2007 [Note that Keene State shares with our most riot-torn campuses the practice of rioting when happy and rioting when sad]. Nearly a thousand students, about one out of five students at the college, started fires, broke windows, turned over cars, threw rocks and bricks at police, and threatened to go on a rampage through the middle of town until they were turned back by dozens of city and state police [Dozens, hah. Lots more than that – SWAT, tear gas, the works – at the Keene State Pumpkin Riot.] who had been put on active duty to prevent the riot.
Brandon’s main point about Keene and other tuition-starved universities is that the school will do anything to keep bodies in rooms (“[I]t was common practice to stack freshmen into [dorm] rooms like cordwood, with as many as four students assigned to a room designed for two. Why? So many freshmen leave the school during their first year – usually at least 25 percent – that colleges overstuff them in the fall to avoid having empty rooms in the spring.”). This means giving in to students on all matters – academic, recreational – and never making them actually study or anything (“I left my teaching position in 2007, right after the dean threatened to put me on probation unless I made my classes more student-friendly by removing grammar from my lesson plans and showing more movies.”). When you add social media’s ability to draw rioters from all over the state to an already large concentration of drunken louts, you turn everything into insanity.
And oh how “disheartened” Keene’s president is by this shocking unprecedented student riot. Disheartened, re-disheartened, re-re-disheartened, re-re-re-disheartened… The sorrowful lot of the university president.
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Oh yeah, UD? And what’s Keene State supposed to do?
There’s nothing it can do. The state will never close the place. As fewer and fewer students attend, the administration will make its lout-friendly atmosphere even more lout-friendly.
But God knows there’s something its local terrified populace can do. Move.
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Let’s end this year’s account of life at Keene State with a comment from another townsperson:
Lillian Savage brought her kids to the Pumpkin Festival on Saturday.
“All you could see was smoke, lots of screaming, lots of drunken rage really,” she said. “I have been coming here since I was a kid and I loved it and now this. I will never come back – ever.”
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UPDATE: You can’t buy this kind of publicity.
Well, we can apparently say that these are the worst – the worst American colleges. UD has heard of very few of them, which isn’t surprising. The worst America colleges tend to fly under the radar – they’re often small, provincial, barely accredited year after year.
UD checked out the one Maryland school on the list (UD lives in Maryland) and it does in fact seem about to lose its accreditation.
Court records show the Internal Revenue Service filed three federal tax liens totaling about $5 million against the college in January and February.
Horrible schools are always losing students. Eventually they just run out of tuition money.
Robert Maynard Hutchins, founder of the University of Chicago, … famously said: “The present primacy of public relations in the management of universities, the view that they must ingratiate themselves with the public, and in particular with the most wealthy and influential portions of it, the doctrine that a university may properly frame its policies in order to get money and that it may properly teach or study whatever it can get financed — these notions are ruinous to a university in any rational conception of it.”
She found it in a solid presentation of the Steven Salaita debacle at the University of Illinois.
Here they are. UD comments on each one.
The writer starts with a new building at Yale, and there’s a reason he starts with this project. It’s the best. By far. Most of the others are quite bad, but the Edward P. Evans Hall, with its soft light ‘fifties modernism footprint is simply a pretty, non-jarring, non-aggressive addition to the campus.
Like a lot of contemporary buildings, its interior is so insanely open and abstract that things like privacy and the human specific seem totally absent. And while UD herself might not be keen on the tendency away from autonomy and individuality, she acknowledges that – especially in a business building – an architect has to reflect the digitized groupworld of the people who inhabit the construction. Evans Hall’s walls feature massive childish Sol LeWitt wall art, reflecting the thin bright bold everything-supersized world of postmodern hedgies (Yale has plenty of gothic architecture and brooding squinting portraiture for its humanities division).
Lee Hall at Clemson (AD’s #8), for its school of architecture, is also excellent. It mirrors the mini-Dulles-Airport, modestly soaring, white-sail-like, radically open floor plan, all-windows, exteriorized technology (see the Pompidou Center) thing the Yale building’s doing – and it does all of this well. And #9, the Reid Building, is equally fine, in the same almost-all-white, radically open, large masses luminescently lit way as Lee and Evans (a critic of the building notes that “Doors are in notably short supply, the whole interior presenting a Piranesi-like fluidity.”). You could argue that Reid is out of keeping with the bricky gloom of its Scottish street, but there’s nothing wrong with having a lighthouse to perk things up.
Eh, okay, so that’s the good stuff. The bad buildings all have stuff in common, just as the good buildings do. Mainly the bad stuff features pointless gigantic dead abstraction (see #4, which clearly has no context at all – I don’t see anything around it – and therefore randomly sprouts, a dying mushroom and a red oxygen canister trying to pump life back into it via an obscure connecting unit); yet more abstract gigantism plus deadly overhangs (#2; #7); desperate chaotic wedging in (#3); overhangs, gigantic abstraction, and dramatic Spiderman-like pointless design features (#5); and, finally, runty off-kilter deconstructed blah with overhangs (#6).
Sideshow Bob and the Missus are now in the spotlight, and the only thing of interest here at University Diaries is their effort to“deep south” Virginia’s public universities.
I guess there’s a reason we differentiate deep and … shallow? south. Apparently up in these parts (‘thesdan UD lives not far from Northern Virginia) you can’t get schools like the University of Virginia to run governor-mandated trials on your laetrile.
Speaking of deep and parts… You may know Sideshow Bob by his former name: Governor Vaginal Probe…
Clueless academic bastion of one of America’s most corrupt and incompetent outposts, the University of Hawaii is constantly losing presidents, chancellors, and – most of all – money.
Tom Apple, chancellor of the flagship campus, is now fired after two years of a five-year contract, so buying out those last three years will represent yet more pointless expenditure.
And when it comes to pointless expenditure, only the public university systems of Hawaii’s mentally challenged sister states – Nevada, New Mexico, and Alaska – compete. Put hawaii in my search engine for all the gruesome details of this truly comatose institution.
So… there’s always a a little bit of hell to pay when the legislature has a chance to chat one on one with the people who run perennial scandal magnets like Rutgers University.
Of course, like most seriously fucked up schools, Rutgers reflects a seriously fucked up state. This is the state that gave us the gone but not forgotten University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. As one local columnist puts it:
[Stephen] Sweeney argues that scandals, including men’s former basketball coach Mike Rice penchant for hurling basketballs and epithets at players, have damaged the school’s reputation and “its ability to purse academic excellence.”
So [putting more political appointees on its board of trustees] would make sense.
Because nothing enhances a university’s academic reputation like a collection of Jersey pols.
You got your basic Scylla and Piscataway dilemma here… Jersey legislators… Jersey trustees…
.. (UD‘s taking that designation from the headline of a recent article about South Carolina State University) could be understood to include pretty much every university ever, uh, covered by this blog. Harvard poor mouths. Yale poor mouths. UD‘s university – George Washington – recently found the cash to buy the Corcoran Gallery of Art; but last month UD attended a meeting where a professor said “if it weren’t for our students from China, I’m not sure the university could continue to be viable.” People say these things when they’re pitching new revenue-enhancing programs, or when they feel more comfortable hoarding than spending the endowment.
On the other hand, UD has covered a few universities which do indeed seem on the brink, though even they aren’t really. How often does a university close? Yeshiva University, embittered lover of rich bitches Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, has been downgraded by Moody’s with such calendrical regularity that the Moody’s Downgrade Days Calendar threatens to replace the Hebrew one. South Carolina State – one big ol’ inept corrupt money-hemorrhaging machine – is certainly in deep doo-doo, but the long-suffering taxpayers of that state will bail it out in order that it may live to stage sports events again.
A significant driving force behind the $13.6 million deficit was a $6.67 million shortfall in last year’s athletic program.
[President Thomas] Elzey said the university is considering eliminating its women’s golf program as well as assistant athletic coaches. Elzey said the university is seeking private donations to help support women’s golf.
“It hurts me to do that,” Elzey said. “I don’t like the idea of retreating back in an area I love dearly, which is golf.”
His institution’s dying and he’s worried about his dead hand shot.