“When universities and school boards have to start paying out substantial settlements, the debate will change,” says Daniel Okrent, who has written histories of both baseball and Prohibition.

But no, that can’t be true. Maybe school boards. Universities all over this country are happily bankrupting themselves to offer their students a game they don’t want to see, with players toward whom they feel contempt and fear. Many universities consider multimillion dollar payouts to abusive coaches, public relations firms, lawyers, and student victims of sexual and physical assault nothing more than the price of doing business. They regularly pay huge sums to clean up epic tailgating trash on campus, and their equally regular post-student-riot costs – riots of course stretch deep into the local community – are astronomical.

Universities have worked into the football and basketball equation totally ruined academic reputations, as well as the pesky business of constantly being at the receiving end of national ridicule on late-night comedy shows. It’s nothing to them to buy up huge swathes of tickets to their own games, since students aren’t going to the games and you need to keep your tickets-bought statistics up or you’ll get in trouble with the NCAA and other groups.

Universities are places where the president makes $500,000 and the coach makes five million. Coach earns his salary by carving out scholarship admission for concussed violence-prone 300-pound steroidal applicants.

(26 CAL U FOOTBALL PLAYERS HAVE BEEN IN TROUBLE WITH THE LAW

That’s a third of the roster.

We’re only counting the last three years.

More than half of the team currently has active charges.

“Out on bail but still on the field.” Corey Ford, one of the U Cal players arrested for assault last week, has in a separate case pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. He was in Washington DC, New Year’s day, drunk and driving on the wrong side of the road. He hit a bicyclist and left him in a coma.

Oh, it was also a hit and run.

Who is the coach at Cal U? Why is this person the coach at Cal U?

Here he is, and he’s got quite the pedigree. A protege of one of the sleaziest coaches out there, the notorious Rich Rodriguez. Oh, and his academic specialty seems prophetic: master’s degree from one of America’s sleaziest football factories – West Virginia University – in — wait for it — safety management.)

Substantial settlements for brain damaged players? So what. A drop in the bucket.

And after all, what is college but a place to send your kid to get and give brain damage?

… of the DC public library (3260 R Street NW) next March and April. It will meet on Sunday afternoons. Each week will be devoted to a close reading of a particular sort of poem. Here’s a rough outline:

week one: introductory remarks
week two: Romantic poem
week three: Victorian poem
week four: modernist poem
week five: postmodern poem
week six: comparisons, Romantic, Victorian, modernist, postmodern poems
week seven: concluding remarks

Details in a bit.

Things that you would not do at home
Come naturally on the floor.

The globally scummy for-profit ed industry works its magic not just here in the US, but also in Australia.

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UD thanks Dirk.

… is where we’ve gotten at a lot of our institutions of higher learning in this country, and it’s a way-strange situation.

Of course we pay much more attention to cheaters staging games in full stadiums. Everyone’s gassing on about the University of North Carolina what a shocker a fine institution bites the dust blahblah… But you could argue that it’s the critical mass of shitkickers like the University of Hawaii and Ball State, with their own scandals, their massive sports budgets, and their microscopic bleacher sections that should draw a bit of attention.

But then Ball State doesn’t even pay attention to itself. It’s in the business of hiding how much it makes students pay to subsidize the empty stadiums.

Even with income from concession sales; NCAA allocations; $1,050,000 in guarantees paid out by Army and Iowa for road football games; private gifts; paid parking; school general funds and other sources, there remains an $11.6 million budget shortfall.

Hidden fees collected from students will make up that deficit, funding 65 percent of the budget adopted this summer by the board of trustees.

UD loves the wizened philosophical approach the Ball State spokesperson takes:

“Human fascination with organized sports reaches back centuries to the days of the Coliseum and the first Olympics,” Ball State spokeswoman Joan Todd said. “It is not a situation we created…”

UD loves that – the profound informed approach, so characteristic of a university setting… It’s like… I don’t know, put pornography in that sentence and it’ll work too – Our university didn’t create the age-old human fascination with pornography, but robbing our students blind in its pursuit is an obvious academic imperative…

As always, though, you have to go to Hawaii for the shittiest shitkicking out there. Truly no one attends their games; every week brings a new coach (hell, a new university president), a new buyout, a new scandal, a bigger deficit. Why aren’t people noticing Hawaii? It’s a far ickier story than UNC, even by university athletics standards.

The late great University of North Carolina. It’s all over but the witnessing, and there’s gonna be a lot of that. Now that we know pretty much everything, it’s time for I Was There.

Hey I was in one of those classes… I did wonder why the campus big shot who taught philosophy – ethics – let everyone in the class over six feet tall skip the course except for exam day and I wondered why they all knew exactly what to write right away on the exam… What kind of ethics is that, to single out just the tall people and tell them what’s on the exam and give them As even though they don’t even attend once?

Didn’t Jan Boxill explain that to you? The end justifies the means.

Higher education news, West Virginia.

It was seven. Now it’s eight. Eight football players under arrest, and that’s just the tally for the month of October. Let’s review:

Two charged with intent to riot and a raft of other stuff.

Six charged with assault.

Most big football universities play by what UD calls the Richie Incognito Rule:

It’s always worth exposing your student body to danger if you can recruit a good player.

So okay he’s had to give a chunk of that back because he stole it. Fine. We at the University of South Carolina are still proud as punch! Charles Bennett’s a winner and Northwestern had him but NU had to pay “$2.93 million in July 2013 to settle claims that the University ignored a whistleblower’s concerns about Bennett,” and I guess all the hoo-haw didn’t sit too well with NU because Bennett had to scoot.

So he became a free agent and we got him! Score one for USC!!

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Background on The Pride of USC here and here.

This post is an addendum to my recent post about the poet Galway Kinnell.

If you’re going to write a music-of-the-sphere and music-of-the-spheres poem, here’s a better way to do it than Kinnell’s. It’s by an old UD favorite, James Schuyler. I’ve gone to the trouble to make it a seasonally appropriate choice.

As always, I’ll interrupt the poem constantly with my commentary. Go here for the poem unmussed.

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A MAN IN BLUE

Under the French horns of a November afternoon [Just start in on the idea that sometimes, some seasons, earthly days introduce themselves so beautifully they seem positively symphonic. Say French horns to convey the high-style baroque rarity of these particular earth-tones. Don’t talk about how moved you are by the music of the globe, the way Kinnell does…. Nice assonance, too – all those ers.]
a man in blue is raking leaves [So this poem will be an extended bit of the poet’s consciousness as he gazes, in autumn, at an ordinary sight – a man in blue (overalls? jeans? in blue as in set beneath a brilliant blue sky?) raking. Like many imagistic poems, this one will follow the thoughts of a speaker as a particular image dominates and complicates his thought. Call it stream of consciousness or interior monologue if you’d like.]
with a wide wooden rake (whose teeth are pegs
or rather, dowels). Next door
boys play soccer: “You got to start
over!” sort of. [Sort of. Or rather. This is hip relaxed New York School verse – see also Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery – which will capture the vague immediacies of world-apprehension, the mind-ramble of a poet.] A round attic window
in a radiant gray house waits like a kettledrum. [The sun is obviously shining brightly – the gray of the house has been made radiant – so we can gather that the man in blue is certainly a man in a blue sky. The poet works his music of the sphere metaphor with the round window as a kettledrum awaiting its entry after the horns.] –
“You got to start . . .” [Repeating this phrase, the poet conveys his continued musing over it. It has obviously attracted his attention and thought. Is he thinking of the earthly as well as human imperative to keep going? The seasonal renewing recurrences of the globe, and our own felt commitment, despite all setback and time-passage, to persisting and thriving?] The Brahmsian day
lapses from waltz to march. [So now he is gathering up his unattributed instrumental references into a particular composer. His mind has wandered – lapsed – from stray instrumental sounds to a specific instance of instrumental music: something by Brahms. And we’re picking up steam here as we go – from the slower waltz to the snappier march, early afternoon to full midday, as the poet sits and muses.] The grass,
rough-cropped as Bruno Walter’s hair, [The sweet, silly, random, way-charming feel of the New York School poem. Start with an absurdity but a truth – hanging around a residential street on a beautiful autumn day can make you so symphonically blissful that you’ll start hearing French horns – and then just keep going, push it deeper and deeper as your free mind and spirit play with those instruments and their associations.]
is stretched, strewn and humped beneath a sycamore
wide and high as an idea of heaven [I don’t think we’re in modernism anymore. Here’s TS Eliot that same day, a few hours later:

[Oh – and Schuyler has in fact now gone directly to heaven – the immense and lovely sycamore puts him in mind of the vastness and loftiness of heaven – but he will cut off at the knees any impulse to get late Romantic about that (the music it prompts in the brain can be late Romantic, but the language the modern poet brings to the phenom will be modern).]
in which Brahms turns his face like a bearded thumb
and says, “There is something I must tell you!”
to Bruno Walter. “In the first movement
of my Second, think of it as a family
planning where to go next summer
in terms of other summers. A material ecstasy,
subdued, recollective.” [And this is how he will cut it off: He will conclude his poem with a fantasied exchanged between composer and conductor about Symphony 2, Movement 1. This is total adorable imaginative freedom on the part of the poet; the appeal and insight of this poem will not be poignantly, longingly, metaphysical – as in Kinnell – but rather it will reside in the hilariously alive play of a creative mind. Notice indeed how subversive of Romanticism Schuyler’s piece is: Brahms himself is eager to downplay the heavy-breathing significance of the movement, insisting to the conductor that he interpret it rather as expressing simple happy domesticity: a family planning a summer vacation: a material ecstasy. Bound, delightedly, to the earth.] Bruno Walter
in a funny jacket with a turned-up collar
says, “Let me sing it for you.”
He waves his hands and through the vocalese-shaped spaces
of naked elms he draws a copper beech
ignited with a few late leaves. [So, Brahms, you mean in this passage where you go lalala duhduhduh bahbahbah… Walter takes up his baton and waves his hands and sings it for us and creates a picture, the sort of picture the late romantic setting has conjured in the head of the poet… Sound, word, song, image, merge in this materially ecstatic synesthesia.] He bluely glazes
a rhododendron “a sea of leaves” against gold grass. [A magician, the conductor lifts his wand and sets the world late romantically alight, makes a poetic phrase of a rhododendron.]
There is a snapping from the brightwork
of parked and rolling cars.
There almost has to be a heaven! [The poet always brings us back to the immediate local reality: The polished metalwork of the cars on the street and at the curbs gives a gloss to the music/scene – the ordinary machinery of modern life also has its radiance to contribute to the earth-symphony.] so there could be
a place for Bruno Walter
who never needed the cry of a baton.
Immortality—
in a small, dusty, rather gritty, somewhat scratchy
Magnavox from which a forte
drops like a used Brillo Pad?
Frayed. But it’s hard to think of the sky as a thick glass floor
with thick-soled Viennese boots tromping about on it.
It’s a whole lot harder thinking of Brahms
in something soft, white, and flowing. [You can record Bruno/Brahms for the ages on your scratchy old Magnavox which by now creates a painfully rough sound. It might be authentic, but it doesn’t transport you. Material, yes, but too material, too thick-souled. On the other hand, it’s just as non-transporting to try to turn the composer and conductor into angels. We don’t do angels around here.]
“Life,” he cries (here, in the last movement),
“is something more than beer and skittles!” [Well, this is pure Schuyler. Of all modern poets, he seems to UD the one most committed to trying to express the sheer weird pulsating bliss of being alive. The crazy running around French horny finale in the Brahms is completely full of beans, after all.]
“And the something more
is a whole lot better than beer and skittles,”
says Bruno Walter,
darkly, under the sod. I don’t suppose it seems so dark
to a root. Who are these men in evening coats?
What are these thumps?
Where is Brahms?
And Bruno Walter?
Ensconced in resonant plump easy chairs
covered with scuffed brown leather
in a pungent autumn that blends leaf smoke
(sycamore, tobacco, other),
their nobility wound in a finale
like this calico cat
asleep, curled up in a breadbasket,
on a sideboard where the sun falls.

… obstacle course.

Color UD impressed.

UD ain’t sayin’ they don’t look good. They look good!

This one graduated from a school on whose board of trustees sits no less a financial figure than Steven Cohen, and whose last president, in her role as Goldman Sachs trustee, approved a nine million dollar bonus one year for Lloyd Blankfein. And of course he’s been a professor since 1997 at Columbia University business school, whose dean is both a film star and a fan of Countrywide Financial Corp.

Gregory Rorke has definitely got the pedigree.

But what does UD always tell you? What does she tell you so often that it’s one of this blog’s most-used categories?

Sing it with me: BEWARE THE B-SCHOOL BOYS.

Scroll down here for Rorke’s long-form bio from his participation in a Columbia University conference titled Out of the Storm But Not Out of the Woods…

Though given Rorke’s arrest for “bilking investors including a former student out of $3 million” (Including a former student! What good are students if they can’t be stooges? Talk about sitting ducks. They’re literally sitting there in your classroom being sitting ducks!) for him it currently looks more like Inside the Storm and Deep Into Preet’s Woods…

This would be Preet Bharara, scourge of Wall Street. “Columbia decline[d] to comment on Rorke’s arrest.” They’re taking the MIT route. Who? Bitr… How do you spell that? Thirty-five years on the faculty? Dean? What the hell are you talking about?

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Did Rorke study creative writing at Brown?

[O]n November 28, 2012, after receiving multiple complaints from Navagate investors demanding repayment and/or threatening to sue RORKE, RORKE forwarded an email purporting to be from a representative of Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation (“HSBC”), which falsely stated that HSBC had just signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Navagate when, in truth and in fact, the email appears to have been a complete fabrication.

November 2012… mere months after sharing his thoughts on “the emerging lucrative exit opportunities and the challenges that the private equity and venture capital industries are facing ahead” [Bit redundant there, says Scathing Online Schoolmarm. If they’re emerging, then they’re ahead…], Rorke was desperately penning good news from Shanghai…

… as she leaves the
house just now, for a
Halloween party.

The speaker is Rula Ghani, wife of the president of Afghanistan.

Florida State. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Penn State. Certain schools stand out from the crowd.