Yes, it’s all guys; and this moving eulogy to what used to be a university ponders the grotesquerie of universities as settings for the ongoing drama of one’s struggle to be a man. John Shelton Reed’s opinion piece makes the point that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill used to be a good school until a group of rich men with their manhood at stake began to stick their dicks in it.
Other famous dick-stickers are Oklahoma State’s T. Boone Pickens (the entire university lolls open to Pickens; his dicksticking into the hedge fund and death payout markets really fucked the place up, but no one cares) and the University of Oregon’s Phil Knight, who has ginned up his new pleasure palace for UO football players with huge lettered signs saying things like EAT YOUR ENEMIES.
Famed Penn State had, of course, multiple and varied dick-stickers.
If the only university arena for at-stake manhood were athletics, it would be bad enough; but as ol’ T. Boone’s hedge fund maneuver demonstrates, sports programs already rife with financial, sexual, and academic perversion are only part one. Like “Big Stones” Larry Summers, who lost Harvard over a billion dollars on interest rate swaps (“No one had the stones to stand up to Summers when it came to this high-risk strategy of essentially borrowing at Treasury rates and investing the proceeds in an illiquid long-term endowment…”), T. Boone out-balled all voices of reason at Oklahoma State and lost the school an unimaginable fortune.
Yet Harvard is so rich, long hot Larry barely made it break a sweat. Ditto for T. Boone. Bouncy bouncy. Big deal.
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Now, soon-to-be-ex-universities like Yeshiva – that’s another matter. It does matter there, because – unless at the last minute Big Berries Rennert decides to give the place a couple of billion dollars – that school is permanently post-coital. (One of the characters in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer says to his lover, “I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucked.” Insert Yeshiva in place of Tania.) Its trustees – trying to compensate for their loss of testosterone when sooooooper-macho fellow trustee Bernie Madoff went to prison – hedge funded away money Yeshiva didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t ever have.
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University Diaries thinks it’s time to open the chemical castration conversation.
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Update: At-stake manhood strikes again:
Polish anxieties about who’s blowing who and who’s got the biggest dick are apparently going to bring down the government.
June 23rd, 2014 at 1:03PM
I like ‘slightly inappropriate.’ Very useful phrase.
June 23rd, 2014 at 8:50PM
I gotta say it, as terrible as what the bball players did to that young woman at U of Oregon, what these big, swingin dicks destroyed at these various unis may be far worse. They destroyed public institutions, meaning that millions of taxpayers have been played and victimized with these schemes…