This blog has followed America’s gun-totin’-est university trustee (and executive committee member of the National Turkey Federation) ever since Ron Prestage done took his loaded 9mm Ruger handgun right smack into the heart of the evil federal gummit.
Evil federal police up and arrested Ron, who explained to the judge that he’s got so many guns he plum forgot about the itty bitty Ruger.
He’s been let off with a 30-day suspended sentence. He returns to his duties overseeing the higher education of students at North Carolina State University.
How long can people remain in a state of surprise? Ever since – at enormous student and taxpayer expense – the University of Minnesota’s new football stadium opened in 2009, every dumbass prediction about its success has been ground into dust. Read UD‘s posts about it. (Scroll down.)
As desperation sets in (there are loans to pay off!) bribery and coercion have begun.
Minnesota offered student packages for men’s hockey and men’s basketball tickets — but only if students also bought slower-selling football tickets. But after students and Gov. Mark Dayton earlier this month complained — the governor said he was “appalled” by the practice — the school adjusted its policy. Forty-two students were given a refund, the school said.
Why wasn’t the governor (he wasn’t governor then, but he was a citizen) appalled when the state went ahead and let the University of Minnesota take all that money and build a failed stadium – one that can’t even get the university’s students to attend games in any significant number? There were already, back then, dark omens that the university had tightened admissions standards to the point where a shocking number of admits didn’t give a shit about football. Why didn’t anyone heed the omens and roll back, say, literacy requirements?
Start them when they’re young. If you treat high school football players with kid gloves, they’re not going to know what to do when they get to Rutgers University and Coach Rice slams basketballs into their genitals and calls them faggots.
What’s also key – and what some high schools forget – is “to get students to bully other students, especially if those students’ parents have made complaints to coaches.” Make a note of it.
… possibility of parole.”
With Mr Football – the inescapable Gordon Gee – as president, with a drunk coach, with more liquor outlets in town than you can shake a couch-burning matchstick at, and with all its money spent on the stadium and a new “inspiration” room for the team (There’s too much West Virginia University filth on this blog for individual links: You’ll have to put West Virginia University in my search engine and settle in for the night.), WVU is jest about America’s trashiest school. Nestled in the heart of pillbilly country, WVU’s got something to offer every dead-head town-trasher in the nation.
West Virginia University: After you drink your way through football games, it’s time to hit the streets and set fire to Morgantown.
First post-riot thing Keene State should do: Make Craig Brandon’s book about the school and his escape from it required college-wide reading. Students need to know the history and culture of their school before they can do anything about it.
Adjunct professor Lori LaBrie, a Keene resident, said there are people who live in the neighborhoods around the campus who aren’t college students.
If students want to do something to help the college’s relationship with the community, they should stop holding parties until 3 a.m., racing cars up and down the streets and setting off fireworks, she said.
“It’s terribly frustrating to people here, and really disrespectful of other residents,” she said.
That’s Keene State, long before the pumpkin wars.
Junior Mariano Perez said Sunday morning he was denied his regular student discount at a local coffee shop. He said he didn’t disagree with the decision, in light of what had just happened.
Freshman Heather M. Fougere said she walked into Cumberland Farms on Main Street Sunday wearing a Keene State College sweatshirt. While there, an elderly couple glared at her, then looked away, she said. She kept her head down, she said.
The Scarlet KSC! I wouldn’t wear those letters for awhile.
People trapped in Keene State Hell are going to do what they can by way of reaction to the destruction of their town, and there’s always the marketplace…
UD feels confident students will continue to find a discounted welcome at the liquor outlets.
Predatory, odious, our next president, and currently dealing with his namesake university being dragged through the mud, first by the New York Attorney General, and now by a judge:
This week, a judge found Donald Trump liable for operating a get-rich-quick school, the erstwhile Trump University, without a license. The case was originally brought against Trump by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office, which, according to the Daily News, alleged that Trump University had “ripped off 5,000 students nationwide by promising to make them rich when instead they were steered into costly and mostly useless seminars.”
While he’s already been held liable for the university’s operation, Trump will now go to trial to see if he’s also liable for defrauding the students.
Can’t wait for the trial.
… town council meeting. Title: On a Foggy Night.
… you can’t be bothered to make any public statements about a very high-ranking faculty member who’s also – according to a number of reports – an outrageous plagiarist.
I mean, it’s a matter of priorities. Do you wanna look at this? Or do you wanna look at some pointless little English professor getting punished for plagiarizing “from at least 160 works over the course of his career”?
Yes, we pay this guy close to $150,000 a year and give him a fancy title AND he has the distinction of having plagiarized an entire article by UD‘s very own dissertation advisor, WJT Mitchell! But hey. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Towards the end of 2012, [in response to] the growing practice of gender segregation at public events in universities, Universities UK (UUK), the governing body of British universities, issued guidance which permitted gender segregation of women in university spaces in order to accommodate the religious beliefs of external speakers. The guidance presented in the form of a case study purported to provide advice in contexts in which the right to manifest religion clashes with gender equality.
Far from addressing the question of sex discrimination, the guidance merely legitimised gender apartheid. It took a campaign and threats of legal action by [Southall Black Sisters] before the UUK agreed to withdraw the guidance. We argued that the UUK’s guidance violated the equality and non-discrimination principles enshrined in the Public Sector Equality Duty under the Equality Act and other equalities and human rights legislation, themselves the product of long and hard campaigning by feminists, racial minorities and other marginalised groups in society. The withdrawal of the UUK guidance was followed by a formal investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission which found the guidelines to be unlawful…
This blog will continue to keep an eye on attempts at gender segregation at universities.
Two dead thrushes in two days on UD‘s deck! Both flew into our sliding glass doors. I think both were young… There’s always a bit of bird carnage out there – maybe four birds a year? – but I’ve never seen two of the same species on two consecutive days. And thrushes, with their famous song.
UD gets more interested in mushrooms each autumn. Her back woods, as you know, are all about dead trees, and she’s been delighted with her giant puffball crop and various less flashy fungi. Today she pulled from a tree what turned out to be a full shelf of oyster mushrooms which yes yes I know you can eat but UD is afraid to eat any mushroom she forages. She doesn’t trust her ability to identify them.
Mushrooms are very in lately.
A haughty orange cat has taken over UD‘s property. It always makes sure to be tramping around when UD‘s outside, and it stares insolently at UD, but refuses to approach. It has the look of a real predator, and UD‘s garden and wood, with its birds and rabbits galore, is just the thing. Today, as UD leaned on her rake (taking a break from dragging leaves curbside), she watched as the orange cat made sure UD was watching, and then shat in a stand of azaleas.
On the plus side, the cat took a long careful time covering up – with soil, leaves, and twigs – what it had done.
Another regular in UD‘s woods is the deer with one antler. I’ve watched this character year after year. Its dead antler never fell off; it hangs, a blackened fragment, off the side of its head. UD usually shoos away deer who get close to her house, but she has a soft spot for One Antler.
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UPDATE: Yikes. Were those birds gifts to me from the cat?
There’s a direct line from what allegedly occurred in Sayreville to Tallahassee, Florida, where an all-too cozy relationship between the university and the local police hindered any possible investigation into the sexual-assault allegation against quarterback Jameis Winston, to bullying in the Miami Dolphins locker room, to Steubenville, Ohio, and to Penn State University.
… Jason Christopher Hartley, a veteran who served in Iraq and the author of Just Another Soldier, saw hazing in the military and says the only way to begin the process of eradicating this kind of behavior is a total reboot.
“It starts at boot camp or whatever the boot camp equivalent in football is. You have to inculcate them and make it clear that you won’t allow this fucked up behavior,” he said, “You can’t do it afterwards. You can’t have a cult that has this kind of shit and then bolt on a new morality and ethics and expect it to work. It can’t. Human nature disallows that. It has to start from day one.”
… involving a professor killing his wife gets going this week. As in other such cases – Professor Zinkhan, Professor Robb – you’ve got a husband pissed with his wife because he thinks she’s unfaithful, or because she wants a divorce, or because he wants child custody and doesn’t want to pay alimony and just because, you know, he wants her out of the picture altogether as in dead.
There was never any mystery as to who fatally shot/beat the unfortunate women married to Zinkhan and Robb, and this latest case is even more obvious than those cases.
University of Pittsburgh professor Robert Ferrante ordered cyanide a couple of days before his wife died of cyanide poisoning. Then, “someone used Ferrante’s computer days after [Autumn Marie] Klein died to learn whether treatments she received after falling ill would have removed poison from her system.” No shit. Wonder who.
Ferrante’s a real sweetie.
[Klein] wanted a second child and exchanged text messages [with her husband] about how the energy supplement creatine could help them conceive hours before police say Ferrante laced it with cyanide, according to a police complaint.
“Will it stimulate egg production too?” Klein said in one text.
Court documents say Ferrante responded with a smiling emoticon.
Here are the major players in the trial, including a lead prosecutor who last Friday got beaten up in a domestic violence incident. You can’t make this shit up.
A townsperson’s comment on this year’s local Pumpkin Fest – a traditional event in the small town of Keene New Hampshire, where residents display carved pumpkins and celebrate the beautiful New England autumn together – could also stand as the motto of Keene State University, a very dangerous American location whose rioting students turn everything – including the Keene New Hampshire Pumpkin Fest – into insanity.
Keene State enjoyed a spot of fame when a man who barely survived teaching journalism there for a few years wrote, post-traumatically, The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It. Last weekend’s riot – pretty much unsurpassed, in the annals of college riots, for violence, injury, and destruction – can have surprised no one who, like UD, read Craig Brandon’s account of the gruesome brew that is Keene State. His book of course reviews the long history of student riots there. A sample:
[T]here were dangerous riots when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 and 2007 [Note that Keene State shares with our most riot-torn campuses the practice of rioting when happy and rioting when sad]. Nearly a thousand students, about one out of five students at the college, started fires, broke windows, turned over cars, threw rocks and bricks at police, and threatened to go on a rampage through the middle of town until they were turned back by dozens of city and state police [Dozens, hah. Lots more than that – SWAT, tear gas, the works – at the Keene State Pumpkin Riot.] who had been put on active duty to prevent the riot.
Brandon’s main point about Keene and other tuition-starved universities is that the school will do anything to keep bodies in rooms (“[I]t was common practice to stack freshmen into [dorm] rooms like cordwood, with as many as four students assigned to a room designed for two. Why? So many freshmen leave the school during their first year – usually at least 25 percent – that colleges overstuff them in the fall to avoid having empty rooms in the spring.”). This means giving in to students on all matters – academic, recreational – and never making them actually study or anything (“I left my teaching position in 2007, right after the dean threatened to put me on probation unless I made my classes more student-friendly by removing grammar from my lesson plans and showing more movies.”). When you add social media’s ability to draw rioters from all over the state to an already large concentration of drunken louts, you turn everything into insanity.
And oh how “disheartened” Keene’s president is by this shocking unprecedented student riot. Disheartened, re-disheartened, re-re-disheartened, re-re-re-disheartened… The sorrowful lot of the university president.
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Oh yeah, UD? And what’s Keene State supposed to do?
There’s nothing it can do. The state will never close the place. As fewer and fewer students attend, the administration will make its lout-friendly atmosphere even more lout-friendly.
But God knows there’s something its local terrified populace can do. Move.
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Let’s end this year’s account of life at Keene State with a comment from another townsperson:
Lillian Savage brought her kids to the Pumpkin Festival on Saturday.
“All you could see was smoke, lots of screaming, lots of drunken rage really,” she said. “I have been coming here since I was a kid and I loved it and now this. I will never come back – ever.”
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UPDATE: You can’t buy this kind of publicity.
Sex (heterosexual and homosexual). Money (unpaid debts). Corruption (a writer nominated for a prize is apparently living with the secretary of the prize’s selection committee). Increasingly unhinged emails between the two combatants.
The ongoing story of Kinga Dunin (well-known literary journalist and Medical University of Warsaw professor) and Ignacy Karpowicz (hot young – significantly younger than Dunin – novelist) hasn’t jumped to to the English language press yet.
Basic narrative, however, is this: Dunin suddenly posted on her Facebook page a complaint that Karpowicz hadn’t repaid the $4,000 loan she’d given him; she wrote that maybe by publicizing the matter she could shame him into it.
Karpowicz responded that for some time Dunin had been allowing him to use her apartment when he was in Warsaw, and recently when she was also in the apartment she invited him to share her bed. Not wanting to make her angry, he writes, he agreed to do so. (He’s either a liar or a fool.) Eventually he fell in love with someone else and broke off the relationship with Dunin. He claims that on their last night together in her apartment, when he told her he was leaving her, she raped him.
Dunin then came back with the claim that Karpowicz threw her over for a man – a man who happens to be the secretary of the selection committee for a literary prize Karpowicz is up for.
It seems likely to UD that the story has enough intrinsic interest to show up, soon, in the New York Times. We’ll see.
Gory details here, if you happen to be fluent in Polish.
