[T]he men going to trial [in the national basketball bribery scandal] are facing decades in prison for something that no one truly believes is a crime. We know that the victims in this case — the universities — are not actually victims, that they are willingly complicit in the deals that get done. If they weren’t, would Kansas have signed a 12-year, $191 million extension on their apparel deal with Adidas after Adidas victimized the university by allegedly funneling $90,000 to [one basketball recruit] and $20,000 to [another]?

… at the Schoharie County Apple Barrel
Country Store. She bought pumpkins.

It’s the site of the terrible crash.

The people in the limo
were on their way to
Brewery Ommegang
outside Cooperstown.

A court in Madrid is investigating whether around 500 Italians received express law diplomas from the King Juan Carlos University, the spokesman said. The Italians were granted the degrees despite having little knowledge of Spanish, according to media reports.

In a scandal dubbed “Mastergate”, the university already faces claims of gifting degrees to [Spanish] politicians by allegedly awarding them good grades without them turning up for class.

The allegations forced the resignation of Cristina Cifuentes, former head of the Madrid region, in April and ex-health minister Carmen Monton earlier this month.

The new leader of the conservative Popular Party (PP), Pablo Casado, who has a Master’s degree from the university’s now-closed Institute of Public Law, is also under fire.

Rampant Titleitis (the uncontrollable compulsion to put Dr. in front of your name) keeps claiming ministers in the Spanish government, and might help take down the government itself. And the next government.

Here at University Diaries, we’ve learned, over the years, that most of the world’s countries feature a nice tight symmetry between universities run by larcenists and people from all over the world with money who desperately seek Doctor.

You can tell a Titleitis university by the Koenigsegg CCXR Trevita its director, paid a pittance by the government, tools around town in.

Since the ‘mastergate’ scandal broke, [King Juan Carlos University] has closed its Institute of Public Law and filed a complaint for alleged misuse of funds involving former director Enrique Alvarez Conde.

Spanish radio Cadena Ser has also revealed that Alvarez and his deputy in the institute allegedly received unexplained money transfers of close to €200,000 ($230,000) between 2012 and May this year.

We’re shocked – shocked! – to find degree-selling going on here.

*************

The last president of King Juan Carlos University.

If I may quote myself.

And damned if we don’t have a tradition. Now comes Hoss Willis (not his real first name, but see if you can watch this tv news report about all the people involved in this latest Baylor University story and not conclude that every one of them should be named Hoss) (as in Hoss) which some guys uh these two guys claim done said bad shit ’bout our womenfolk and plus you know blacks and Jews and all…

UD is curious about one small detail. Pussy singular or pussies plural? Here’s what one attorney charges:

“Willis made [a] comment to the effect ‘the reason Baylor has such highly qualified (black) football players is because Baylor has the best blonde haired, blue-eyed…’ and he used a very bad term relating to the young girls at Baylor.”

I’m thinking pussy singular.

UD also likes the way the news report, whenever it mentions that an investigator flew to France, shows us a picture of the Eiffel Tower with an airplane next to it.

Woman In Burqa Condemns Woman in Chador

Burqa-Wearing Islamic Preacher Slams Muslim Women for Wearing Hijabs

It is because you are so entitled.

************

It’s an age-old problem, and it’s hitting, of all places, ‘bama. The smarter your students, the less likely they are to do something as stupid as go to a football game.

So, you know, you make the argument that football deserves all this revenue cuz it’s going to make the school so much better, and in ‘bama’s case it does. It does make the school better. Much smarter students have been enrolling.

However: The fewer your drunken dipshits, the emptier your seats; and ‘bama’s student section is emptying out, man. Big-time.

I believe the pertinent phrase is victim of your own success. Hoist by your own petard.

************

You know it’s getting really bad when the local press starts trying to educate ‘bama students in how to be fans.

[I]f Alabama fans really wanted to help create a home-field advantage inside Bryant-Denny Stadium on Saturday, then they wouldn’t drink (too much) alcohol before the game.

Most Alabama fans don’t know what it’s like to go four quarters in the heat, but it’s tough work. It’s a process, and that process starts long before game time. Look, it’s going to be dangerously hot on Saturday. Don’t be that fan passing out in the fourth quarter. Be safe. Drink something other than Pappy’s whiskey.

These instructions might be meaningful to the great-grandchildren of tenant farmers; I doubt out-of-state merit scholars looking for low tuition will make much sense of instructions about game attendance that involve fine-tuning your alcoholism so that you can withstand hours of torturous heat.

***************

Tsar Nicky’s anger with his subjects grows with each game. Eventually he will order a random group of non-ticket-holders lined up at the very top of the stadium and shot so as to fall ever so slowly all the way down to his statue. The rest of the students will get the message.

Nice try, babe.

Instead of lying through his teeth about it forever, Jerome Allen has decided to admit that he took mucho money and goodies from stinky Philip Esformes to lie about the basketball skills of stinky’s son so the son could get admitted to U Penn. Once safely at Penn, the kid’s lack of basketball skills immediately rendered him useless to the team; but meanwhile, there he was, at Penn.

He’s a senior now, and, the story of his fraudulent admission having broken, is maybe embarrassed. But when your father’s about to go on trial for the largest welfare fraud in history, his having bought your admission to college probably doesn’t loom that large.

*************

Penn’s own coverage worries about “a confirmed instance where bribery benefitted a student’s admission into the University.”

In my friend Barney’s obit, the writer, Benedict Carey, not only mentions UD, but links to her.

UD is delighted.

Where UD learned her manners.

You know UD‘s obsession with oreo cows; you know that, bizarrely, oreo cows now live right next door to our upstate NY house. They’re part of this elegant new outfit down the street.

Now UD‘s sister-in-law, currently in residence, sends her photos of the cows having wandered out of their enclosures and DIRECTLY ONTO our front field. She has AWAKENED to a herd of oreo cows at her door.

I’m so fucking jealous.

Vinod Khosla’s Wikipedia page still says he’s a trustee of a very high-profile outfit committed to fighting global poverty; but in fact his name disappeared from this page not long ago; and UD‘s thinking it’s maybe cuz a filthy rich stinker who goes all the way to the Supreme Court to keep people off a public beach is … not a good look for the Blum Center…

I’m seeing public presentations to the globally poor in which representatives from the Blum Center say Our trustees include a billionaire who has never spent a night at his colossal coastal property in California and in fact doesn’t like the beach but decided he wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars clearing out the place, posting armed guards, and pressing his case to keep doing that up to the Supreme Court. We feel your pain.

Well, good luck with that; your Grievance Studies hoax (aka Daughter of Sokal), just now disclosed, will get plenty of attention, etc.

It might even help people understand how scandals like Avital Ronell happen.

But although the hoaxes keep coming, and although America’s best minds – Richard Rorty, for one – have for decades warned us about the deadly combination of hypertheory and political correctness —

When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ‘problematizing familiar concepts.’

Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.

— no one seems able to find their way out of the fog.

[T]he burqa has already been banned in some form or another in several countries of Western Europe, such as France, Belgium and Austria. The Netherlands and Denmark are the two latest countries to place a ban on the burqa. Bans in various forms, such as bans on burqas in schools and colleges, or other public places or in certain jurisdictions, are also in place in Germany and Norway.

All of these are democratic and technologically advanced countries as well as free societies with high levels of gender equality. The … Freedom House report ranks Norway as the freest country in the whole world, with a perfect score of 100/100. The Netherlands, with a score of 99/100, comes second.

Ban it in India.