← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

“[M]ost of the persons I knew welcomed a breather from the football culture.”

That’s a Southern Methodist University professor waxing nostalgic about the few precious non-football-dominated years the place got after its program was shut down for massive corruption.

Note his language: SMU got a breather. A welcome breather.

Football at a place like today’s bad boy, Penn State (there are tons of identical locations in the US), is a total environment, a macroculture, a ship of fools, a village idiotocracy, a cretin collective, a deeply settled dunciad. If you give it the death penalty, if you shut it down, you’re going to create a situation of collective psychic numbing (the term comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s groundbreaking work on traumatized cultures).

If you want to know what post-death penalty Happy Valley will look like on the ground, go here, to the Jim Morrison grave/pilgrimage site in Paris. After Paterno’s official statue is taken down, his followers will construct their own and will, like Morrison’s people, camp out there. As they give way to despair, they will place more and more Jim Beam bottles along the statue’s surfaces until it, like Morrison’s memorial, becomes a famous object d’art, a gawker magnet. Happy Valley will become a curiosity, its revenue now derived from tourists who come to stare.

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

Uh-oh.

Margaret Soltan, July 20, 2012 10:11AM
Posted in: sport

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=36613

2 Responses to ““[M]ost of the persons I knew welcomed a breather from the football culture.””

  1. Phiala Says:

    A line of police blocked the street around 6am this morning while chainink fence and blue tarps were erected to shield the Paterno statue from sight.

    The statue is to be stored in a safe place, while the library will retain its name. The president’s statement is a minor masterpiece.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Phiala: Many thanks for the update and the link!

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories