The University of Hawaii-Manoa has a $31 million deficit and growing. Its big athletics program is a morgue, a wasteland, a joke. Its latest interim chancellor (you haven’t seen administrative turnover until you’ve seen Hawaii) has a statement to make:

Some have suggested cuts to the athletic budget and system administrators’ salaries, but [Robert] Bley-Vroman said the deficit requires more structural solutions. “There are big forces here, and they have to do with the society’s view of education and who’s going to pay for it.”

Yes, it’s a big, big… cosmic problem, and until we as a nation reconceptualize the entire ground of university education as such, cutting the athletics budget is pointless.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm approves.

In the wake of the Ray Rice horror show, and the Adrian Peterson horror show, and the Greg Hardy horror show, and the Ray McDonald horror show, and the Daryl Washington horror show, and the Jonathan Dwyer horror show, and the 725 other arrests among the players who make money for him, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced on Friday afternoon in a mea culpa press conference that all 32 teams and their employees must attend educational sessions on domestic violence and sexual assault.

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LESS NICE SENTENCE:

The University of Nebraska treated one patient who recovered and is now caring for a freelance NBC cameraman.

The point of the exercise, as you know, is to make a poem out of words taken from a newspaper article.

Here is the article.

Here is the poem, whose title is the article’s headline.

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CASSINI SHOCKED BY SATURN’S SPONGY MOON

Cassini’s shocked by Saturn’s spongy moon
(Craggy porous distant Hyperion).

Value as we study interactions
Between humanity and solar winds.

Well, we can apparently say that these are the worst – the worst American colleges. UD has heard of very few of them, which isn’t surprising. The worst America colleges tend to fly under the radar – they’re often small, provincial, barely accredited year after year.

UD checked out the one Maryland school on the list (UD lives in Maryland) and it does in fact seem about to lose its accreditation.

Court records show the Internal Revenue Service filed three federal tax liens totaling about $5 million against the college in January and February.

Horrible schools are always losing students. Eventually they just run out of tuition money.

UD‘s George Washington University colleague Jonathan Reiner has a lively Twitter page, featuring, most recently, his claim that the CDC’s protective equipment rules for the prevention of infection by Ebola are inadequate.

… Sayreville thing), allow UD to reiterate her position.

This is a blog about universities and the problems with them. UD‘s interest in football (which under normal conditions would have to grow to become cursory) is restricted to what it’s doing to our universities.

UD (as you know if you read this blog) calls football The Freak Show That Ate the American University.

As for football outside the university: UD recognizes that millions of Americans need regular, massive, violent, pissed to the gills spectacles. She’s had little to say about the NFL, the tax exempt non-profit organization to which the nation has given the job of mounting the spectacles. Similarly, she’s had little on this blog to say about NASCAR. If universities began fielding NASCAR teams, she’d begin talking about it.

That there is a world of blood-lust outside the university is unremarkable. That universities – outposts of civil reasoning – are sometimes little more than football camps is quite remarkable. The university, as institution, starts out so high that its transformation into a football camp represents a resounding fall into the gutter.

We all know the schools that have really let themselves go – Penn State, Rutgers, Alabama, University of North Carolina, University of Georgia, Auburn, University of Miami, etc. – and we all know the obvious stuff covered by journalists: systemic cheating, sometimes orchestrated by professors; systemic corruption by money; high rates of player crime; budget-busting payouts of fired coaches. This blog covers that stuff, but also tries to evoke the daily, on-the-ground scummy environment that football camp university students and professors endure.

I don’t mean simply, for instance, the humiliation of being threatened all the time by coaches and high ranking administrators who are angry with you because you don’t go to games, or because you leave games early. How many emails per day does a typical University of Alabama student get from the school’s enraged multimillionaire coach harassing her about her non-attendance? How bad is she willing to be made to feel because she is focused on university studies? How often must she be made to defend her preference for reading over watching steroid poppers break each others’ skulls?

I also mean the literal filth of the university football camp. I mean the University of Georgia’s long struggle with post-tailgate trash all over campus (trash that includes human waste). I mean North Carolina State’s similar problem, concisely expressed by a campus journalist: “[W]hen the students get drunk, they don’t really care what goes where.”

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Why are university students en masse refusing to go to football games? Everyone’s worried about it. Michigan State’s AD says it’s “embarrassing,” but he doesn’t think it’s embarrassing that a coach putting on shows no one wants to go to makes three million dollars a year. One sports writer calls the non-compliant University of Miami student fans “pathetic,” but he doesn’t ask himself whether rational people might prefer not to be identified with a pathetically corrupt program. Florida A&M is all upset that no one goes to their football games. Does it occur to them that people would prefer not to have to think about manslaughter when they see a marching band?

One of UD‘s erstwhile colleagues (he was a visiting lecturer at George Washington University) gets down and dirty with his building’s ventilation system.

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UPDATE: THE FREUNDEL STAYS ON THE MENU:

A highlight of the menu at the Char Bar kosher restaurant in Washington is the items named for some of its more prominent Orthodox clientele. One is the Freundel. Its namesake, Rabbi Barry Freundel of Kesher Israel Congregation in Georgetown, was arrested Tuesday by D.C. Metro police and charged with voyeurism.

But owner Sima Soumekhian says he isn’t pulling the Freundel sandwich from his menu.

“At this point everybody is entitled to due process,” Soumekhian said Wednesday.

The Freundel features grilled pastrami and smoked turkey, with Chipotle sauce on a rustic bun.

Thought I wouldn’t post anything today, didn’t you?

You were right.

… this and like this on UD‘s woodland path this morning. She raked most of them away, but brought some inside for Mr UD to look at while reading the New York Times. She spread four of them out in front of him on the black table and he mustered a bit of enthusiasm.

Last night, we heard owls for hours. “Is that the kind that says What’s-On-For-Lunch?” asked Mr UD.

“No,” said UD: “Who-Cooks-For-You.”

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Plus I just discovered a shroomfield of collybia asema.

… wins the economics Nobel.

Here’s the man himself, giving a lecture in English.

(Tirole looks a bit like the young Marlon Brando as Napoleon.)

(So far, biographical information is mainly available in French, and I’m not finding anything quirky, I’m afraid.

Né à Troyes, d’un père médecin et d’une mère enseignante en lettres, Jean Tirole se dirige d’abord vers les mathématiques, intègre l’Ecole Polytechnique, et découvre l’économie sur le tard, à 21 ans.

Eventually we’ll find out something of interest to people who read novels. Something more exciting than his having discovered economics at the strikingly advanced age of 21. But not yet.)

Here’s a good discussion of his work, with plenty of links. (Scathing Online Schoolmarm forgives Tyler Cowen for not knowing where to put semi-colons; he’s too excited.)

Shaping up to be a good year for the French. They also got the literature award.

Here’s some of what Tirole says in the lecture I just linked to.

Voting is a very crazy thing because we are never going to affect the outcome of an election. It’s a zero-benefit activity… We engage in pro-social behavior without any apparent benefit to ourselves… If you are paid to give blood, you give blood less often… It’s very hard to explain such so-called crowding-out effects… These are examples in which price is not very effective as an incentive device…

Do we do these things because we’re being watched? Because we’re trying to up our self-esteem? Social esteem?

You want to feel good about yourself. So if you give, you’re going to feel better about yourself.

But this can’t explain the phenomenon very well.

Generosity is a very very complex concept…

… no, not too understated, and not too overstated… Just too stated, too much (like Robert Frost’s) assertively out there… Carolyn Kizer has died, and UD has as a result been reading through her poems with more attention than she’s ever before given them.

Here’s a good one, with a way sly rhyme scheme and a solid, not too stated, point of view. As always, UD will mess up the poem with her comments, so if you want to see it unmessed with, go here:

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What the Bones Know 

[There are fundamental truths you know in your bones, not in your mind. There are truths of the body, not the soul; you learn these truths by having a body and enjoying it, as we’ll see as we read the poem.]

Remembering the past
And gloating at it now,

[In particular, remembering the great sex she had. See in this connection – since Yeats is prominently mentioned in this poem – a poem like his A Last Confession, number nine of the poems listed here.]

I know the frozen brow
And shaking sides of lust
Will dog me at my death
To catch my ghostly breath.

[She knows her body; she knows that even as she’s dying – especially as she’s dying? – she will feel sexual desire, because her commitment to life is so intense that she will fight its cessation by drawing upon whatever she has left in her of lust. The vital passions within her will try, in a last desperate effort, to “catch” her becoming-a-ghost breath before death stills it.]

I think that Yeats was right,
That lust and love are one.
The body of this night
May beggar me to death,
But we are not undone
Who love with all our breath.

[Note how cleverly Kizer will deploy her death/breath rhyme throughout the poem. This pair’s first appearance will be in tandem – one line after another. Their next appearance has them divided by one line – the line ending in undone.

Glance down to the two final stanzas. Death and breath are divided by two, and then three, lines. Breath gets the final word, and has therefore it seems gradually shooed death away, kept it at a greater and greater distance.

And note the argument here: Even if I die tonight, I’ll have lived a life in which I fully loved, and so I’ll enjoy a sort of immortality.]

I know that Proust was wrong,
His wheeze: love, to survive,
Needs jealousy, and death
And lust, to make it strong
Or goose it back alive.
Proust took away my breath.

[Boo Proust and all sex-in-the-head mentalists. Not only are they wrong that we’re twisted enervated creatures who need all sorts of perverse inducements to get it up and keep it up; they mess with our simple natural ins and outs. The poet breathes; Proust can only wheeze.]

The later Yeats was right
To think of sex and death
And nothing else. Why wait
Till we are turning old?
My thoughts are hot and cold.
I do not waste my breath.

[The heart of the argument lies here: My thoughts are hot and cold. Hot and cold. Sex and death. Frozen brow and shaking sides. Yeats didn’t want us to think of sex and death like the Proustian mentalists; he wanted us to be mindful of both always, unafraid of the realm of both always, running our passions full blast hot and cold. Here’s Yeats:

[T]hough it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.]

La Kid, in Chicago, hung out last night
with one of the famous Lucas Brothers.

They’re identical twins.
I have no idea which one she’s with.

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She just called. It’s Keith.

UD asked La Kid what they talked about at the crowded chic Chicago bar pictured.

“Law school,” she said. “He attended law school.”

Here’s what UD found out about that.

Both [brothers] attended top-ten law schools, Keith at Duke and Kenny NYU. It was the only substantial period of time that they’ve spent away from each other, but they didn’t grasp the difficulty of being apart until, after both dropped out, they reunited and began their standup careers in New York. Keith stays in touch with a few friends but Kenny none, citing the indisputable fact that, “law students are just miserable, boring people. And they stress out over shit they imposed on themselves.” Although their mother supported their decision to pursue the dream, their friends were dumbfounded. They were only a semester away from obtaining their J.D.s. “The dean actually called me and tried to talk me into finishing,” Keith recalls, “but we wanted to remove the safety net when we cut the cord.” It was a crazy move but also indisputably awesome and bold, creating a piece of trivia that will surely follow them around for the rest of their careers.

Coming to a university near you.

This is in a defense of the sport, by the way.

The core of the defense?

If you don’t let us beat the shit out of each other on the field, we’ll get frustrated and come and kill all of you.

Football: Just the thing for a university setting.

That’s the part that always gets to UD. The University of Nebraska says to its student body Look who we got to play with you! Room with you! Study with you! Richie Incognito!

You’ve got all these American universities doing everything they possibly can to recruit legions of violent nutbags whom they immediately and without warning loose upon a clueless group of normal teenagers.

Clueless? Worse than that. These students are predisposed to worship the recruited players. Unless they grew up in Sayreville, they have no idea how twisted is the cult from which the recruited emerged. Like fools, they jostle each other to get near their heroes…

Victims, many of whom are fellow FSU students…