University Diaries » — I WILL DO SUCH THINGS

It’s outrage-season at Florida State University, with professors tweeting and against a big bad world of people saying mean things about their school and their football team.

For the last ten years FSU has been dominated as an institution by one of the foulest football programs in America, featuring academic cheaters, abusers of women, and a rabid fan base that won’t hear one word against the program. Overseeing the foulness have been cynical coaches, presidents drawn from the football team or the corrupt state legislature, professors who for years have offered cheating-friendly online courses, trustees who are either ex-FSU football players or rich FSU football boosters, and a local law enforcement establishment happy to look the other way. As FSU football racks up more and more player assaults against women, even a sports-loving country has started laughing at the hopeless endless vileness of the enterprise that enables them.

Rather than, say, suspend the program and collectively ask itself where its university went, FSU has deepened the hilarity. Its president, a man who hasn’t exactly been morally punctilious when it comes to the team, has now drawn himself up to his full height and sternly lectured the lads on good and evil. (“FSU coach Jimbo Fisher has suspended both Cook and Johnson from the team – a nice touch after he refused to suspend Winston when he was under investigation – and has pledged to ‘do better.’ University president John Thrasher backed up his coach, saying that he has ‘no tolerance for the type of behavior alleged in these cases.’ Well, except for that one time when an alleged rapist played quarterback and led the ‘Noles to a 26-1 record over the last two years. Then, John Thrasher can find a way to build up tolerance.”) One of his players has entertained the country with his own Before and After: Filmed one day unhesitatingly smashing a woman in the face, he was filmed a few days later clutching his mother’s hand and gazing into the camera on Good Morning America.

And now FSU students and professors join the fun, registering shock and awe in the face of the world’s disgust with their long-running farce.

This is a runaway university. Maybe someone there has the sense to try to stop it before it crashes.

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