“Narrow” is an adjective the academy should not shun but embrace, for if academic activity cannot be narrowly defined, it loses its shape and becomes indistinguishable from political rallies and partisan exhortation. This of course is what the [Israel] boycotters want. [Extremely broad definitions] do not enhance the academic enterprise or add a heroic gloss to the concept of academic freedom; rather they destroy both by emptying them of any specific content.

… where Richie Incognito spent two years as a university student.

Every powerhouse recruited him. His old man wanted him to go to Miami, but Junior felt at home during his visit to Nebraska. “I don’t want to go anyplace else,” he told his father. “There is nothing to do there. It’s just football.“

LOL.

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‘Course, they’re way past Incognito problems now.

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Oh, why be coy:

Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s current leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.

… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.

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All of which confirms for the millionth time that if you want true surreality, the really actually deeply bizarre, you don’t go to America’s big cities. As David Lynch knows so well, if you seek America at its most scarily twisted, head for the rural heartland.

… with fixed bayonets, for the order to go over. My mind was a blank, except for the recurrence of S’nice S’mince S’pie, S’nice S’mince S’pie… I don’t like ham, lamb, or jam, and I don’t like roley-poley…

‘Of course it’s murder, you bloody fool,’ I agreed. ‘But there’s nothing else for it, is there?’ It was still raining. But when I sees a s’nice s’mince s’pie, I asks for a helping twice…'”

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For Veterans’ Day, an excerpt from Goodbye to All That, the World War I memoir by Robert Graves.

[Incognito’s drunken] assault [on a woman] at an annual team event happened in view of sponsors. [Head coach Joe] Philbin knew it happened yet continued to preach about the quality of the men in his locker room. He got rid of Chad Johnson after a domestic violence incident but kept Incognito after a sexual abuse incident.

The National Football Post on Friday reported Incognito called offensive line meetings at a strip club and fined players if they didn’t show up…

But the Dolphins allowed Incognito to be a member of the leadership council, which empowered him as a leader.

A coach, aware of the sexual assault and Incognito’s penchant for drinking and past drug use, overrides the player vote for leadership council. Philbin this week instead hid behind that vote, saying it was players, not him who made Incognito a team leader.

Look, the people within the Dolphins’ organization claiming complete ignorance of the apparent tension in Martin’s mind over Incognito and others are either lying – which makes them complicit – or out of touch, which makes them incompetent.

Either way, it is grounds for dismissal.

Some fans see what’s going on. And they’ve had enough. Fans have been writing to me and telling me they’re through with the franchise. Others say they’ll never buy a ticket again until major changes in leadership are enacted.

Consider that the Dolphins had 70,660 people at Sun Life Stadium for the season home opener. Then 68,342 for the second home game. Then 60,592 for the third home game. And 52,388 for the fourth home game.

Notice the trend?

Fans were abandoning this team in droves before the current scandal. You think any part of the last week is going to convince them to return?

The Dolphins failed to get public funding for upgrades to their stadium before this happened. Who’s going to vote to give them public money now, and what brilliant politician is going to champion the cause?

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Though college and professional football detests – to the point of seeking and destroying it – any form of thinking, it might be time for the sport to do some reading in the extensive literature on disgust. (The New York Times provides a reading list of some recent works here.) If American football fails to understand the nature and effects of the stupendous revulsion it generates even in its fan base, it might not be able to save itself.

America’s wholesome, family-friendly tailgate culture claims another victim.

This blog regularly features tales from the tailgates. Just type tailgating in my search engine and scroll down.

My, my. The University of Nebraska. Don’t let your kid go to school there. Dangerous. Nebraska’s very keen on violent people. Will keep them on until they charge the school’s football coach.

When he wasn’t suited up, he was still getting into brawls — found guilty of misdemeanor assault in after “one of those parties in a Van Wilder movie” in February 2004, a former [Nebraska] student told The Post.

“I had to use the bathroom, and I knocked, and heard there were two people in there — and they weren’t happy I was knocking,” recalled the former student.

“I waited, and then suddenly, out comes Richie and his girlfriend. He was irate.”

Eventually, Incognito, like an uncaged beast, “tried to pin me on the bed,” as Cornhusker pals joined in, he continued. “I felt something hit me on the side of my face and my head went into a wall — it was Richie taking a cheap shot. “At that point he was threatening to kill me.”

The 6-foot-3, 320-pound lineman — who was punching holes in the walls when he couldn’t find a chin — finally left the party, but not before cold-cocking a poor sap who happened to be standing by the door. “He took his cell phone, threw it, and then punched him on his way out,” the former student said.

Incognito was set to play his junior year for new coach Bill Callahan, but was unceremoniously suspended from the nationally ranked squad, a move thought to be precipitated by the February brawl.

The Daily Nebraskan, the school newspaper, applauded the news…

“He was one of the worst people I ever interacted with,” [a student] told The Post. “It was just so extreme and unrelenting. There was no sense that he learned from anything when he got in trouble.”

[The student] said he nearly came to blows with Incognito …

“We were both in line at Wendy’s and he was standing over me . . . staring at me, ” he recalled. “He eventually just grunted and walked away.”

Officially, Callahan said at the time, “We have team rules. They’re very simple to follow. If they’re not followed, and they’re not complied to, then (you) suffer the consequences, unfortunately.”

But a former student told The Post the reason he heard from “inside the locker room” was that Incognito “tried to charge Bill Callahan.”

Callahan could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, the Incognito family made excuses for their son.

“Richie won’t take crap from anyone. He’s a hard-nosed kid, and Nebraska doesn’t want hard-nosed kids anymore,” his father told the Lincoln Journal Star.

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The article ends with an extremely weird statement from one of Incognito’s friends.

“He got kicked out of two universities. Guys like that don’t make it in the NFL. They usually float off to oblivion.”

Uh, getting kicked out of a university – or, more typically, flunking out – is the royal road to the NFL. Don’t know what this guy is thinking.

Some of Gore Vidal’s family members are irritated that he willed his fortune (almost forty million dollars) to Harvard University. The New York Times interviews various confused friends, like the one in my headline…

It’s not just that Harvard already has close to forty billion dollars in endowment money; it’s that Vidal spent a lot of his life presenting himself as a man of the left who despised the gilded establishment and was mad for the radical redistribution of wealth. People at the very least expected him to set up a foundation in support of free speech and other rights; some expected him to establish his Italy house as a writers’ colony.

So there’s a lawsuit now, with family members making as ugly a spectacle of themselves as Vidal often did toward the end of his life. (“I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal’s character — a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide,” wrote Christopher Hitchens in 2010.)

There’s a 2012 essay here, at Inside Higher Ed, about Vidal’s history with Harvard. It features a curious little clip of him portraying a pompous Harvard professor.

Of course for old UD the principle here is simple: He wrote and signed the will; he wasn’t in great shape, that’s true; but giving it to Harvard is a plausible thing for someone as complex in his motives to have wanted, and it should be respected.

From a New York Times column:

“It is a fair thing to point out,” said Shannon Hale, a Mormon who writes young adult fiction, “that there have been very prominent Jewish writers that have received a lot of accolades, and worldwide the number of Mormons are comparable to the number of Jews, so why hasn’t that happened?”

Ms. Hale’s theory is that literary fiction tends to exalt the tragic, or the gloomy, while Mormon culture prefers the sunny and optimistic.

“When I was an English major, then getting a master’s, most of the literary fiction I read was tragedy,” said Ms. Hale… The books she was assigned treated “decline and the ultimate destruction of the human spirit” as necessary ingredients for an honest portrayal of life.

UD‘s not sure she’d put it like that. Take a novel always ranked Number One and unlikely (if the NYT column is correct in its descriptions of Mormons) to generate enthusiasm or writerly inspiration among most Mormons. Take James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s not a tragedy; as Joyce Carol Oates points out here, it’s a comedy.

The highest and most spirited comedy is by necessity democratic — even anarchic. It celebrates life: the livingness of life, not its abstract qualities. Where [T.S.] Eliot saw the contemporary world as futile because disruptive of the past, Joyce, the realist-fantasist, the unparalleled mimic, gave life to these clamorous voices without passing judgment on them.

True, the novel follows dispirited Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as they drag their asses through Dublin; yet although both men feel themselves to be in decline, there’s nothing destructive about their shared fates this particular day: They are fortunate enough (thanks to Bloom’s kindness) to meet each other, and to forge a compassionate and perceptive fellowship. They celebrate the livingness of life, singing, gazing at stars, reciting poetry, telling jokes, sharing memories, and of course going outside and peeing together:

At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Similarly?

The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.

What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?

To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pelosity. To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised (1st January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine excrescences as hair and toenails.

I don’t think it’s the gloomy aspects of modernist novels like Ulysses that seem at odds with Mormonism; rather, I suspect it’s precisely these novels’ non-abstract, non-judgmental, earthbound, ongoing livingness – their straightforward and candid capture of the way we actually think and feel and act from moment to moment – that’s jarring.

How important is this sport — about whose head-shattering vileness everyone, post-Incognito, is talking — to our universities?

The New York Times reviews the Incognito years – the glory years – at the University of Nebraska and the University of Oregon.

After a whistle at one [Nebraska] practice … he was accused of hitting a backup lineman, Jack Limbaugh. “He did that kind of thing to a lot of his teammates,” Limbaugh said. “I just walked off the field. A fight is what he wanted, but I wasn’t going there.”

Incognito was suspended for fighting in practice during 2003, and Nebraska sent him to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., which treats psychiatric and behavioral problems. He was reinstated and was named an All-Big 12 Conference All-Star. But before the 2004 season, Incognito was found guilty of a misdemeanor assault charge. He was still on the roster until he fought a teammate in the locker room that summer. The new Nebraska coach, Bill Callahan, dismissed him.

He was quickly accepted into Oregon as long as he sought anger management therapy.

Incognito’s stay was less than two weeks, not long enough to even participate in a full practice. He never registered for any courses, according to the registrar’s office.

From an article written during his time at Nebraska:

“I don’t ever want to reduce anybody’s aggressiveness, ” [said] Barney Cotton, Nebraska’s new offensive line coach…

… Incognito is considered the brightest young star on the offensive line and has been mentioned in the same breath as former All-Americans such as Dominic Raiola…

Oh yeah RAIOLA!

Remember the Lions’ Dominic Raiola, another Nebraska offensive lineman by the way, verbally attacking the University of Wisconsin marching band before Detroit’s game in Green Bay earlier this season?

Ohio University currently enjoys the coach responsible for Raiola and Incognito – Frank Solich – and does it ever enjoy him!

Nothing sends a message of discipline to a college football team quite like its coach being passed out, drunk, at the wheel of a car pointed the wrong way on a one-way street.

Yes, that was ol’ Frank just a few years ago…

Incognito, Raiola, Solich…

Cornhuskers must be mighty proud! We need more of their All-American heartland values out here in cynical Washington DC.

[Football has] become the major theater of American masculine crackup…

[It] would be really good, it would be a really good thing, if the NFL moved its boundaries in such a way as to show some minimal respect for mental health.

… [W]hen a player says he needs time off for mental reasons — … in a sport with a suicide problem — it shouldn’t spark a national conversation on whether he’s soft.

You don’t think it’s true of college too? Read this post, and click on all the links.

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UD thanks Timothy.

An associate dean at the University of Virginia – apparently a computer expert – “used his UVa email address in making a 2010 online payment to the peer-to-peer [child pornography] network and last year logged into his account from a school IP address, according to the affidavit.”

No bail was granted. He’ll go on trial soon.

Yikes. Brown University couldn’t have that. Student input on Corporation membership would almost certainly have vetoed Steven Cohen and Steven Rattner.

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UD thanks Roy.

… happens all over the American university, of course; but some forms destroy the institution and some just cheapen it. I think Derek Bok is right that when for-profit businesses start providing instructors for non-profit universities’ online courses, it’s extremely destructive:

[Northeastern University’s online] instructors mostly do come from “the Northeastern family,” [a campus representative] says, meaning people familiar to the university because they are alumni or have taught the course before as lecturers. But on “one or two occasions,” …the university has needed someone, “and Embanet has provided an instructor for us.”

… Mr. Bok sees a “dangerous trend.” Even though campus officials insist that they control hiring decisions, he doubts that a college would veto a company’s recommendation in a situation in which students were waiting for a class, and time to find a teaching assistant was limited. Mr. Bok emphasizes that he is speaking generally, not about any particular institution. But as a matter of principle, he says, “you have crossed the line” by using a private company to recommend teaching assistants.

“You have now delegated an essential academic function, which is choosing who will assist in the teaching function, to a company,” he says. “You could say it’s not very important. But of course, the way principles break down is because the first thing is not very important.”

Similarly, when pharmaceutical companies, through subcontracted ghostwriting firms, write scientific articles for university professors (articles touting their pills), it’s extremely destructive. It goes on quite a bit – as does corporations running university courses – and it’s extremely destructive.

We find out about it when the lawsuits start happening: When students sue schools on the basis of fraud (as they have for some time been suing the tax-syphon for-profit ed providers), and when the government sues yet another corrupt pharma outfit, as it has most recently successfully sued Johnson & Johnson, we see how the deal works, how universities in search of revenue hand over their academic functions to corporations.

In the Johnson and Johnson matter

the case file includes a list of academic researchers who wrote articles for medical journals that the company allegedly used to overstate the benefits and understate the risks of a blockbuster drug…

A primary investigation underlying the case identified 44 articles written by university scientists and colleagues, many of them joint collaborations that included Johnson & Johnson researchers, described as being overseen in some manner by the company.

Yes, let’s do it together! Let’s run the class together; let’s write the article together. After all, we’re both motivated by the same thing: Pure pedagogical or scientific integrity…

UD was warmed to see the name of Joseph Biederman, a man who has arguably done more than anyone to make the world safe for baby Risperdal, among the university scientists working, er, hand in glove, with Johnson & Johnson.

Some university authors — including Joseph Biederman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard who gained renown for collecting at least $1.6-million in consulting fees from drug makers …appeared to be more personally aware than others of their misrepresentations…

Dr. Biederman, through a lawyer, declined to comment on his work with Risperdal.

Johnson & Johnson will pay a pittance – 2.2 billion – in penalties for having illegally marketed Risperdal. Joe will keep his trap shut and stay at Bok’s Harvard. All quiet on the western front.

It’s truly fascinating to UD that the psychosis at the heart of university and professional football is now, thanks to Richie Incognito, openly discussed.

“Three teams [and two universities, Nebraska and Oregon] employed Richie Incognito… His ability to play to the edge of lawlessness is valued… He is a valued commodity in the NFL…”

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The NFL generates billions of revenue dollars selling violence. Players are hired to perform acts of mayhem on the field. Such a profession attracts some menacing individuals with checkered citizenship records.

Former NFL coach Jerry Glanville talked about needing “borderline trained killers” on his team. In other words, he needed some Richie Incognitos to compete.

Commissioner Roger Goodell spends a lot of his time suspending players for various misdeeds, but that is just the PR side of the industry. He keeps the corporate sponsors happy by pretending to keep his work force wholesome.

His people will work overtime sanitizing the Miami situation. Look for the league to roll out extensive anti-hazing guidelines.

But the NFL will never change the essence of the sport and endanger the bottom line.

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[The] NFL was fine with Richie Incognito’s insanity as long as he didn’t cross [the] PR line. …

[W]e don’t really care as long as our own needs are filled. Neither did three NFL teams. Neither did two college football programs.

And when one had finally had enough of his crap, somebody else was always willing to step up and take a shot on Incognito. Because he helped fill up the seats and turn on the TVs.

… If you can play, any antisocial behavior will be overlooked or at least rationalized, even if it’s borderline psychotic.

Football at the highest level welcomes sociopaths. As long as they don’t cross certain public relations boundaries that threaten the game’s or a team’s bottom line. Then, and only then, does football have a problem with people like Richie Incognito.

The fact is, we like our violence and we like it with an edge. And if once in a while, some crazy outlier takes his helmet off and swings it at another player or stomps on somebody after the whistle, hey, it’s great cooler talk after that dreary Monday morning status meeting, right? And all of us writers and bloggers have something to tee up and get page hits (with an accompanying video), right? I’m doing it now.

And so, we will wring our hands on the panel shows and act as if people like this are somehow out of the ordinary and not part of our slice of humanity while the game we love keeps rewarding them.

Who’s twisted? The outlaw player? Or all of us who help enable him?

OOOOHHH… Le Fooootball… C’EST MOI….

I mean, c’est the University of Miami, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Penn State University, Rutgers University, all them big-time universities out in front with academic fraud, sadistic coaches, child-predator coaches, booster-money-under-the-table players, professional agents drooling over the team… All of these schools have been grooming the next Richie Incognito…

And think about it. What’s the great crisis in university football today? Empty stadiums, that’s what. Why aren’t people coming to the games? Why, why, why?

Well, one possibility is that they’re disgusted by the comprehensive scumminess, the super-insulting farce, of big-time university football. They’ve got this vague feeling there’s something of a disconnect between what you just read up there in this post and the university.

But another possibility, if the guy I just quoted is right, goes in the opposite direction: The sport isn’t violent and twisted enough.

If he’s right, Richie can turn challenge into opportunity and open Incognito Consulting, a boutique firm specializing in turning sadists who get lost in the crowd into psychopaths who make entire stadiums stand up and cheer. Coming soon to a university near you.

An entire issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics is devoted to the notorious corruption of the pharmaceutical industry, and (of abiding interest to University Diaries) the way pharma-supported university research has corrupted universities.

The rise of pharmaceutical-firm-funded university research changes the social context of research, and along with it, the opportunities and constraints on researchers. [Garry C.] Gray uses a case study of a medical school professor’s first experience with pharmaceutical company-sponsored research in order to examine how funding arrangements can constrain research integrity. The case study reveals that there are conflicts between the norms of commercial firms and universities.