The French are worried about the Italianization of French life, as Adam Gopnik notes in a New Yorker article about Dominique Strauss Kahn:

[M]any in Paris [anxiously note the] “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…

We Americans aren’t worried, but there’s plenty of evidence that we’re Italianizing right along with the French:

[No one really cares about the University of North Carolina scandal because] any college sports scandal after Penn State [seems] like business as usual. Nothing ever can approach the horror and depravity of a sainted coach knowingly allowing a child rapist to use a storied football program to help him cultivate victims, exemplifying the awful depths to which a school would go to protect images, all in the name of a game. When the epitome of rectitude is revealed to be rotten to its core, there’s no going back to a pristine, previous time. No-show classes and fraudulent term papers can never resonate the same way again after the searing testimony from violently scarred children, who were failed by coaches, administrators, campus police and the cult of worshipful, willfully blind fans.

… So we can only get so angry, anymore, even for something seemingly so big and so important. We know too much. We have seen too much.

Another example of the emerging Italian attitude in America:

It is not so much that UNC has been giving away grades and sending its athletes to the “easy grade” courses, because that goes on at every campus that needs to keep its athletes academically eligible… If this is not an important issue in our society then let the band play on and the circus continue …

Americans have become so accustomed to depravity at their big-time sports universities that they no longer rise to any occasion that falls short of horror.

Lament on Chapel Hill

Time was when we couldn’t be prouder
Of Professor… er… Ms Deborah Crowder.
Her work with Nyang’oro
Was rapid and thorough
And no one was able to out her.

… with yet another celebrity
UD is supposed to know about
but doesn’t.

Lo Bosworth?

Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston is being accused of point-shaving in the Florida State game against Louisville this year to help a high-school friend win money. TMZ reports that the quarterback is said to have purposefully tanked during the Seminoles’ first half against Louisville on Oct. 30. Florida State was losing 21-7 at the half, but the team came back to win. Winston was previously accused of raping a fellow student and stealing crab legs. He was recently suspended for half a game for chanting “fuck her right in the pussy” in public on campus.

(UD thanks Dave.)

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Oh. And if you’re wondering why this university just keeps on keeping on with Jameis Winston, here’s a quick rundown of the business interests and community involvements of the school’s board of trustees, starting with Allan Bense and moving alphabetically.

Golf Courses
Being an FSU Fan
Golf Courses
Seminole Boosters Club, FSU Athletic Board, Captain of the FSU Football Team Back In The Day
FSU Booster Club
Florida Sports Foundation
Seminole Boosters Club
Seminole Boosters Club
Orange Bowl Committee
Stumbled across one of the few female trustees here. No sports involvement listed.
Two final guys list no sports involvement.

So according to UD‘s count, that leaves three trustees out of twelve who might – I say might – have some vestigial sense of what a university is. But one of the three is a woman so forget her. That leaves two, one of whom is a professor at FSU, so forget him.

I’m afraid that leaves you, Brent W. Sembler.

“Government during this period was based mostly on precedent, and the court had become little more than a centre for highly ritualized ceremonies,” we are told, and the internal governance of one modern American university (and probably many others) turns out to share just this form.

Professor Julius Nyang’oro, the Big Thinker behind the highly ritualized system of fake classes at UNC, was never, for twenty years, reviewed or cycled out as department chair because, we are told, the leadership of the university “thought that would be awkward.” Above all, UNC honors precedent (I’m sure the fake class ritual in one form or other long preceded the Nyang’oro dynasty), ritual (there were no actual classes, to be sure; but there were intricate and abundant ceremonial classes), and the absolute power of a closed aristocratic court.

For everyone else, the UNC dynasty provided that other court, a sweaty arena where the commoners played.

… is the amount Penn State (well, the citizenry of Pennsylvania) has paid out (so far) because of the Sandusky scandal. It’s a figure the University of North Carolina scandal will almost certainly surpass, now that the first of thousands of athletes screwed by that school has sued.

The class action possibilities here make the ongoing class action against Professor Chancellor President Donald Trump of Trump University look paltry by comparison.

[Mike McAdoo is] suing the university in federal court, saying UNC broke its promise to give him an education in return for playing sports. His lawsuit is a class-action suit that the other 3,100 students who enrolled in the fake classes — nearly half of whom are athletes — could easily join.

“From selection of a major to selection of courses, the UNC football program controlled football student-athletes’ academic track, with the sole purpose of ensuring that football student-athletes were eligible to participate in athletics, rather than actually educating them,” says his lawsuit …

“UNC has reaped substantial profits from football student-athletes’ performance for the school, but it has not provided them a legitimate education in return. As such, UNC has breached its contract with Plaintiff and Class members, in violation of North Carolina common law,” wrote his attorney, Jeremi Duru, who is also a professor of law at the Washington College of Law.

… as he attempted to show a jury that he didn’t kill his wife, also a University of Pittsburgh professor. He had to overcome the fact that he used his university credit card to order cyanide shortly before she died of cyanide poisoning, and that he “did online searches on cyanide poisoning and how it might be removed by the medical treatments Klein received [as doctors were attempting to save her life] or detected by a coroner after her death.”

Jurors, who briskly found him guilty of first degree murder (mandatory life sentence), “also said Ferrante’s decision to testify may have been a mistake.”

Yes well, you could argue no one would be better on the stand than a murderer who really really didn’t want to go to jail for the rest of his life… Or you could argue it the other way… That you really shouldn’t put the person who murdered the victim on the stand because he’s liable to betray a smidgeon of involvement in the event… Or if not that, he’s liable to betray the not very nice personality that a person capable of standing by while his wife is “groaning, moaning and gasping for air” (due to the cyanide he just put in her drink) is likely to have.

Have to agree with you there.

This should sell a lot of tickets! Every eye in the country is on the California University of Pennsylvania football gang, which has scraped together enough members out on bond to field a game tomorrow against little Mercyhurst University, and is currently preparing by reviewing video (“Mr. DiLucente said he believes there is a video of the incident but has not seen it.”) of its most recent play.

Go and watch U Cal make them squeal! Football Strong!

This obscure institution has now scored an in-depth article in Newsweek. And all because of its football team! Sports truly is the university’s front cell.

My poetry MOOC just broke 8,000.

To understand big-time university sports, you have to go beyond the headlines. UD spends a lot of time reading the local booster press at pitiably sports-obsessed places like Indiana University so that she can understand the deep structure of a significant part of this country’s grotesque (the recent failures of Penn State and the University of North Carolina to, uh, control their narratives has contributed immeasurably to our recognition of just how grotesque) university system. So take this latest piece out of Bloomington, which announces its grasp of reality in its headline. Let us see how that reality is evoked.

The background here is that everyone in Bloomington has decided to be upset because some mysterious critical mass of team criminality has flicked some switch in their collective mind. Should they fire the coach? Would that be with cause or without cause? What’s the deal with recruiting anyhow? Have we tarnished our grand reputation? Und so weiter.

Start with coacha inconsolata (background on that term here).

[The] mess in Bloomington [has occurred under Coach Tom Crean’s] watch … [He’s a] grown man unable to keep his teenage players from chasing the night — no matter how hard he tries.

This great and good man has tried and tried and tried. Let’s not talk about how the same man avidly recruited these players.

Next: Lugubrious nostalgia for The Earlier Better Coach, The True Great and Good Man. Unfortunately for this writer, that role at Indiana is played by notorious Bobby Knight, the most frighteningly demento university basketball coach ever. So let’s see how we handle that prose-wise, in our reality-based account of things.

Bob Knight may be long gone, and though he didn’t live a life of sainthood in Bloomington, he drafted … [the] “It’s Indiana” blueprint. It’s a privilege to wear the candy stripes. And with it comes responsibility, higher standards, round-the-clock commitments. It’s not easy. It’s not always fun. But it’s what’s expected.

I mean, which of us is a saint? Which of us hasn’t experienced a rage so intense we’ve thrown a chair at referees during a basketball game and then because of our general aspect of insane obscene violence been thrown out of the game? A game we’re coaching? And this is the man who drafted the blueprint that for some reason players aren’t following. What’s wrong with them? Can’t they follow an example?

Now to the defense of the players themselves.

Troy Williams and Stanford Robinson… when they weren’t failing drug tests, were putting in the work and getting better.

So it’s another mixed bag, like Bobby Knight: Putting in the work, chair-tossing, drugging… Throw it all in together and you get a storied team!

There are two final elements of all booster journalism:

1. Biblical quotations.

“He talked about how we are our brothers’ keeper.” The athletic director describes the coach’s recent pep talk.

2. Always calling the players “kids” and invoking an inspiring future with them.

The kids … will forge onward this season.

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To review: These are the basic elements of university sports booster journalism:

* Coacha inconsolata

* Players are children; the coach is their hapless adorable bumbling dad

* Great times lie ahead

* Nostalgic reminder of our grand tradition

* Biblical quotation reminds us God is on our side

* Gotta take the good with the bad, balance the failed drug tests with the work ethic

The only thing missing here is the otherwise very popular Comparative Approach. We’re pretty scummy, but Florida State is so much scummier. Scathing Online Schoolmarm recommends the writer revise and extend his remarks to include the Comparative Approach. Then he will have written a comprehensive account of Reality in Bloomington.

Uh, no. Enrollment at California University of Pennsylvania has fallen off. It’s led by a clueless interim president and seems to have no plans to find a permanent one, clueless or not. It has allowed its football coach to assemble a team one third of which is in trouble with the law.

Last week, six players ganged up on a man, beat him close to death, and shouted “Football Strong!” while doing it.

So the eyes of the world are upon Cal U of PA. Even in the context of naughty football teams all over the United States, the crowded jail cell that is Cal U football stands out.

The interim president has spent forty years at Cal U of PA. Her entire career. She’s been in various academic and administrative positions there. How can she not have noticed the rather curious recruiting philosophy on the team? The let’s-go-all-out-and-not-even-give-a-shadow-of-a-shit-about-rap-sheets recruiting philosophy? Each one of the twenty-seven current naughty players has a public record, and many of their deeds have been chronicled in the press. Cal U is only a big story now because of the lusty teamwork behind this latest assault, and because, in the wake of the assault, a local news outlet had a reporter actually sit down and do the math on Cal U’s Big Men on Campus.

UD looks forward to details on the classes these guys have been taking. She’s going to guess they’re all clustered in Criminal Justice. If she’s right, we’re in for some fun.

… Rugged Maniac obstacle.

She did the course last weekend.

Yale med’s Dean Robert Alpern and some men think there’s not a problem, and they’re boys, which means they’re in charge.

So they’ll make the decisions, thank you very much.

Some women best keep their traps shut. Dean Alpern can protect his friends and fail to protect his enemies just as effectively as I’ll Kiss Your Lips in Liguria and Kick His Ass in New Haven Michael Simons can.