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If you’re a scandal sheet like University Diaries…

… nothing makes you happier than scandals involving religious universities, places that often wear their piety on a very self-righteous sleeve. Obviously it’s more fun when those places (rather than yucky secular schools like the University of Miami) turn out to be fraud-ridden hellholes run by sordid people of the cloth. Think back over our posts covering Yeshiva University, Baylor, Seton Hall, St. John’s, St. Louis, Southern Methodist…

Schools that have never hidden their trashy nature – Liberty, for instance – don’t make the list because they’re so overtly icky that they don’t even qualify for hypocritical. (Put the names of any of these schools in my search engine for wonderfully stomach-churning details.)

Wheeling Jesuit, or whatever the wreck is calling itself these days, has a real place of honor on the Gruesome Godly list, having for years been run by a dissolute cabal headed by jacked up jesuit AND HEAD OF THE ENTIRE WEST VIRGINIA CATHOLIC CHURCH Michael Bransfield. The details of his depravity – in the article I just linked to – are, even by church standards, pretty remarkable. But as I’ve endlessly pointed out, whether it’s Jewish Yeshiva or Catholic Wheeling, you don’t get there without large all-male incredibly parochial boards of trustees and boosters making the world safe for the very vilest among us.

Margaret Soltan, December 30, 2019 9:54AM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

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8 Responses to “If you’re a scandal sheet like University Diaries…”

  1. charlie Says:

    So the contractor, who did the renovations, is a Mass attending catholic, who is sickened by the bishop’s depravity. Nevertheless, he still financially supports an institution he knows is corrupt. None of this nonsense could persist if adults grew up and stopped believing deranged mythology….

  2. Ravi Narasimhan Says:

    Isn’t this just the trough that Byrd filled running dry?
    https://www.corporations.org/welfare/inquirer5.html

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Ravi: Wow. Had no idea about that history. But it’s such a familiar story.

  4. Ravi Narasimhan Says:

    Technology has been saving education forever and Wheeling has been going out of business just as long. But, once the faculty are fired, the majors reduced, and the mission revectored the brand may still survive – the cat isn’t gone as long as the smile remains. Is this one of those simulacrum/postmodern moments where craft and intrigue save the day?

  5. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Ravi: I followed one school years ago where vanishingly few students applied – I think it must have been Chicago State… Here’s the post! And I considered just what you’re considering: Can a university that’s basically nothingness continue to function? And my answer was a resounding YES.

  6. Ravi Narasimhan Says:

    They can come back as Wheeling Jesuitical University, then.

    I’ll show myself out.

  7. charlie Says:

    The late David Noble wrote extensively regarding technology and worker displacement. The phenomena isn’t limited to production/blue collar work. In “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Rducation,” he chronicled the corporate obsession with replacing professors with computers that delivered the professors own curriculum. In other words, a teacher’s knowledge, research, experience, no longer belonged to the human being, but was usurped by the institution, to be utilized for whatever profitable method available. In essence, the uni becomes a cipher of a school, and instead, becomes a method of profit extraction…

  8. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Whirling Jesuitical?

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