You’ve got it exactly backwards. He’s the highest paid person because he’s got the balls to risk everyone’s safety. That’s what we call Vision. Commitment. Grit. It’s worth millions.

And after all, the job of the fan base, as it well knows, is to sacrifice itself for the team.

… so University Diaries gets to cover him… Here’s what she’s found so far – a biography Mark Moogalian provides on his home page. It doesn’t mention academia, but maybe he got an appointment after he made the home page. He’s an artist-of-all-trades:

Mark Moogalian was born in Durham, North Carolina, where he spent a good part of his youth along the banks of the Eno River. When his family moved to Virginia, the James River took the Eno’s place. He started playing guitar and was singer/songwriter/guitarist for Look Like Bamboo and Javaman, two bands he founded in Richmond, Virginia, during the late eighties and early nineties. He then travelled to Europe where he busked from London to Venice, taking in the culture and writing songs. The trip to Europe was a turning point in his life. Mark later moved to France where he worked as a translator and English teacher for business professionals. In France he continued to write, record and perform music and often played in a small club in Paris called Le Gerpil. He lived on a houseboat on the Seine, the third river in his life, where he took up welding and started making abstract metal sculpture. He met Isabelle Risacher in 2002 and they were married in 2003. Mark had his first sculpture and painting show at Galérie 43 in Paris in September, 2006. Mr. Farride is his first novel.

And here’s what he did:

Mark Moogalian, a 51-year-old professor at the Sorbonne, tackled Ayoub El-Khazzani during Friday’s bloody incident aboard an Amsterdam-Paris international service.

Mr Moogalian, who lives in Paris but is originally from Midlothian, Virginia, US, is the previously unnamed man who came to the aid of “Damien A”, 28, a French banker who confronted El-Khazzani.

The academic acted instinctively to protect his partner Isabella Risacher, who was also aboard the Thalys train.

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

Okay. He teaches Spoken English here, at The New Sorbonne University (Paris III).

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

Photos of Moogalian, before and after being shot in the neck.

You have to do the hard work of getting inside the culture of schools like Baylor and Louisville (the University of Louisville, a reliable scummy-sports-source on this blog, just recruited a guy — “domestic violence charge involving a gun” — even Texas Christian found too scary).

But it is hard work. Take Baylor. The larger culture of its hometown, Waco, heartland of homicidal Harley honeys, birthplace of branded breastaurant-bred Boss-Hoss boys, is mainly about open carry. That’s the burning social justice issue that fires up so many Baylor/Wacoites — now more than ever:

The day after a deadly confrontation between rival biker gangs in Waco, top Texas lawmakers defended a proposal to loosen the state’s handgun laws [to allow open carry].

What plenty of people in Waco and at Baylor seem to be, uh, shooting for is a campus/town where hotly recruited rapists and criminal biker gangs are placed in an open carry setting…

UD understands that this picture seems unfair to these Texans, whose self-image involves prayer for themselves and for the souls of recruited rapists who shall be redeemed in cleansing local waters. Same as these football programs. And so many others. It’s all about winning football games and redeeming souls.

So you’ve got Baylor’s famous president, Ken Starr, overseeing an internal investigation of his school’s rape-positive policies, and he’s already at a disadvantage, since his experience lies in investigating consensual sex (or, as a commenter at the Chronicle of Higher Education poetically puts it, “President Starr, you went after Bill Clinton for much less. What are you going to do about this ugly mess?”). And you’ve got all the hump-lovin’ folk of this great land, who understand the crucial synergy between sexual and on-field violence, as dramatized so succinctly here.

In this film’s most poignant moment, a father pleads: “Just give it to me straight Doc. Will my boy ever rape again?”

As long as schools like Baylor and Louisville exist, we can answer that question with a resounding Yes.

… non sequitur:

Police Chief Nate King says a fight at a nightclub at 100 East Downing Street attracted dozens of people and ended in gunshots and a stabbing. He says two people were shot and one was stabbed.

King says one of the shooting victims was an NSU football player.

The police chief said officers originally arrested two people, 30-year-old Damon Glass, AKA, Damon Shade, for accessory to assault with a deadly weapon, and 23-year-old Robbie Foreman for two counts of assault and battery with a deadly weapon, possession of a firearm and possession of a firearm while intoxicated.

Friday night, however, the chief said Foreman confessed to the stabbing and shooting. He also said Glass was no longer in custody.

There’s a quaintness about downtown Tahlequah, with its many storefronts offering unique shopping.

… is how they seem to sing it at Baylor University, a Christian school apparently, but far more committed to football (and basketball) than to anything spiritual… I mean, if you go by the sorts of things that happen there…

For instance, it’s a very violent place, which seems to UD (she’s no expert) rather at odds with the Christian ethos. One of their basketball players a few years ago “punched Texas Tech forward Jordan Barncastle … breaking Barncastle’s nose and causing both benches to clear.” Although concussed during a recent game, Baylor’s quarterback insisted it was nothing and that despite some fogginess and a headache he’d be back out there again right away because nothing’s more important than winning at football. And

In January, 2014, Tevin Elliott, a defensive end out of Mount Pleasant, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for twice assaulting a former Baylor student in 2012. During that trial, two other women testified that Elliott assaulted them. A fourth alleged victim was not called to testify.

And now everyone’s abuzz with the latest Baylor violence: Under the same coach as Elliott’s, another football player is going to jail for sexual assault on a Baylor student. And this player had already been “kicked off the Boise State football team after punching and choking his girlfriend.” It looks very much as though the Baylor coach knew about this violent past.

But hey. If there’s one thing you’ve learned reading this blog, it’s that plenty of American universities will open their arms to woman beaters if the guys can catch a football. And the schools will do all they can to lie and cover up and victim-blame (Baylor carried out a wretchedly inept internal investigation.) until the bad stuff their football players do goes away. Or maybe it doesn’t go away.

And… uh… this seems to be the Christian way. I mean… One of America’s leading Christian universities keeps doing it.

Baylor’s president is Ken Starr. That Ken Starr. Investigator extraordinaire.

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

Read this if you can stomach it. Baylor is a sister school to Florida State University, with similar cooperation by local media and law enforcement. Absolutely disgusting.

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

UD thanks dmf.

[Buried deep in Chris Borland’s message are ideas]… threatening to the NFL and our embattled national sport. It’s not just that [former pro player] Borland won’t play football anymore. He’s reluctant to even watch it, he now says, so disturbed is he by its inherent violence, the extreme measures that are required to stay on the field at the highest levels and the physical destruction 
he has witnessed to people he loves and admires — especially to their brains… [Football, he says, is] a dehumanizing spectacle that debases both the people who play it and the people who watch it….

[Borland is] the most dangerous man in football.

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

Borland’s Wisconsin teammate Mike Taylor describes his pregame regimen before a bowl game against Stanford this way: “I’m just laying on the table before the game, buck naked, just taking shots of s— I don’t even know. Taking pills, putting straps on, putting Icy Hot on. People were coming in and looking at me like I’m a f—ing robot, like I’m dead.”

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

[One Florida State University player] said it wasn’t the practices or the physical abuse that bothered him, but how the coaches force-fed him and his teammates. “They watch me clean the plate… ‘You let that settle and then go lift.’” That’s in addition to the supervised supplement-swallowing, the pills and powders of who the hell knows what.

“He looks down at me, this monster man, this beast, and now he’s got kid eyes,” [Derek, an FSU instructor, reports,] “and he says to me: ‘Mister Derek, sometimes I’m not hungry anymore.‘”

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

Players’ cafeteria, University of Oregon.

Eight of the fifteen American university football teams that dominate the “most flagrant chaplaincies” list also dominate the “most team arrests” list.

“MOST FLAGRANT CHAPLAINCIES“:

Auburn University
University of Georgia
University of South Carolina
Mississippi State University
University of Alabama
University of Tennessee
Louisiana State University
University of Missouri
University of Washington
Georgia Tech
University of Illinois
Florida State University
University of Mississippi
University of Wisconsin
Clemson University

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

MOST ARRESTS:

1) Washington State: 31
2) Florida: 24
T-3) Georgia: 22
T-3) Texas A&M: 22
5) Oklahoma: 21
T-6) Iowa State: 20
T-6) Missouri: 20
T-6) Ole Miss: 20
T-6) West Virginia: 20
T-10) Florida State: 19
T-10) Tennessee: 19
T-12) Alabama: 18
T-12) Iowa: 18
T-12) Kentucky: 18
T-15) LSU: 16
T-15) Marshall: 16
T-15) Oregon State: 16
T-15) Pittsburgh: 16
T-19) Arkansas: 14
T-19) Michigan: 14
T-19) Oklahoma State: 14
T-19) Purdue: 14
T-23) Auburn: 13
T-23) Colorado: 13
T-23) Kansas: 13

Harvard University (endowment $36-plus billion, but it’s got far more money than that if you count other assets) PLUS one of these guys:

In 1999 .. the 10 largest collegiate football programs brought in $229 million in revenue. By 2012, the same schools reported revenue of $762 million. “Profit margins had ballooned to hedge-fund levels.” … Overwhelmingly, the cash is reinvested in athletic programs. As a Texas sports official put it, “We eat what we kill.”

What an amazing school that would be… What an icon of the postmodern university… Unimaginably rich, it would hoard/eat its cash, so that little to no money would be put to academic use…

Imagine this school as a massive nubbed therapy ball stuffed with a trillion dollars. Fund managers and sundry money fetishists would be invited to squat on its nubs and bounce around …

… in a hard-hitting, no holds barred interview about his school.

TRIBUNE: What are your early impressions of what Andersen is doing with the football program?

RAY: He’s terrific, but he’s the first who would tell you, it’s what happens on the field that represents the success or lack of success in terms of wins and losses.

Yale University: Eat the Rich.

… who has died, age 97.

ELEGY

Look to the heavens, Heliotrope.
Follow the sun. Sun, shine!
The streets are numbered, shelled, and soft:
Eleventh, Olive, Chestnut, Pine.

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

The epigraph is from Rimbaud, a very grotesque poem of his in which “the poet’s heart is puking over the poop of a ship.” He asks the waves – the magical, transformative, abracadabra, waves – to take his heart and wash it, clean it, make it no longer a heart that has been “depraved” by a depraved world. So let’s say that Smith has taken from Rimbaud the idea that the world is so nauseating and sordid (he’s writing this poem in the midst of yet another war) that our desperate desire to escape it becomes downright suicidal. Maybe it’s better to be dead.

The poem itself – a brilliantly condensed, weirdly suggestive and associative lyric – seems to address a soldier killed in the war (You shipped him off…), a young man to whom the poet softly and sympathetically speaks.

You, a young plant, a lover of the light, a follower of the sun – as you lie there dead, look up in the sky and see that sun. Follow it heavenward, to a cleansed realm of light. Throw off your casket (Pine), your dead body, your “shelled” body (bombed, eviscerated), and leave the degraded world, the realm of finitude and division, where the streets, like your days, “are numbered.”

And now there’s a stanza about that world left behind, with its indifferent partying semi-human (mannikin) cigarette and club girls who lean back in their chaises and briefly note the absence of the dead man (Over the waves extends the Rimbaudesque waves).

And now the voice shifts, and a mother or a wife angrily mourns his loss, and again an image from the sea appears in a reference to the famous ice-entrapped ship, Endurance. He could not survive the extremity to which he was subjected, and his survivor cannot fathom the distance now put between them.

Note how, like T.S. Eliot and many other modernists, Smith melds very high spiritual language (Look to the heavens) with very low modern/commercial language (He left me all his life insurance). The party girls, and his survivors, remain in a dark degraded world, while the heliotrope twists toward the sun.

And now this strange unsettling little song repeats its first verse, presses on the dead soldier its insistence that he cleanse himself entirely of this world, and ascend.

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

That was one way of putting it, to quote Eliot. Like most great highly compressed lyrics, this one is wide open to interpretation.

… A recent survey of police records show that Washington State University has the most football players [in the country] who have been arrested within the past five years.”

Background on Washington State’s terrific football program here.

Or, as the article’s headline has it:

DOES COLLEGE FOOTBALL SUCCESS CORRELATE WITH CRIME?

Yes. Yes, it does. Which makes all the clucking certain universities do about the importance of student safety extremely amusing, doesn’t it? And then there’s the NC “Why should you exist?” AA.

The University of Nebraska went way out of its way to recruit Richie Incognito. Most of the SEC schools in particular seem to try really really hard to get some of the most violent of the young and concussed to be part of their campus.

The college athletics arms race includes increasingly intense competition for the biggest and nastiest out there; and of course only the biggest and nastiest make it to the professionals, where fighting isn’t simply something you do at bars near campus. It’s a way of life.

How does Nick Saban earn a zillion dollars a year? He recruits the biggest and nastiest to the University of Alabama.

Excerpts. In honor of the dean of the WVU School of Public Health.

I brush my teeth with Coca-Cola, wash my face with mountain dew
We live down in chemical valley, licorice water runnin’ through,
Licorice water runnin’ through

… All is money, all is power, one man’s loss is another’s gain
I just do the best I can, put out my bucket, pray for rain
Put out the bucket and pray for rain

… Once we were Almost Heaven, now we’re open for business
That’s the place that I call home, West Virginia

University Diaries has long
chronicled the efforts of dozens of
thoughtful people who feel called
to do something about this:

All sorts of people have stepped up
with good ideas about how to stop
one school from hoarding billions
and billions of dollars. Hoarding
them. Not using many of them, for
educational or charitable or whatever
uses. Just sitting on them. Or handing
out huge gobs of them to their
fund managers.

How did the money grow so fast and
get so big? A combination of
tax benefits – “Harvard’s income
from capital gains, interest, and
dividends is all tax free,
and the donations it receives
are tax deductible.”–
and the inexhaustible ego of
hedgies who can’t think of anything
better to do with hundreds of millions
of charitable dollars than throw
them at one of the world’s richest
institutions. That way, they get
their name associated with Harvard.

All sorts of proposals have come
forward, most having to do
with messing up those exemptions,
although a few appeal directly to
Harvard alumni to divert their
contributions to actually worthy causes.

About ten years ago, when people realized
that this non-profit was paying several
of its money managers 35 million a
year, there was an upsurge in outrage
and in proposals for change.
You can type harvard endowment into
UD‘s search engine if you want to track
years and years of reform proposals from
many different people.

As my post’s headline suggests,
none of this reformist activity
has had the slightest effect.
Harvard keeps hoarding what it
has and supplementing it with
hedgie vanity thingies.

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

If you’re aware of this history,
you tend to respond to the like-clockwork,
beginning of the academic year,
New York Times op-ed about this
with a certain wryness. You begin to
recognize the ritual by which
Harvard acknowledges the fact of
complaint and bats it down with
the familiar bullshit (Everyone needs
a rainy day fund!) and then the
whole thing goes away for another year.

But anyway. (Deep mournful breath.)
Here’s the latest gesture, this one from
a professor who’s a tax attorney.

“We’ve lost sight of the idea that
students, not fund managers, should
be the primary beneficiaries of a
university’s endowment. The private-equity
folks get cash; students take out loans.”

So (world-weary sigh) here’s the latest
go-nowhere proposal:

“Congress should require universities with
endowments in excess of $100 million to spend
at least 8 percent of the endowment each year.
Universities could avoid this rule by shrinking
assets to $99 million, but only by spending the
endowment on educational purposes, which is
exactly the goal.”

Yes, yes, hear, hear, good fellow.
Jolly good fellow.

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

UPDATE:

Some good snark from Malcolm Gladwell.

Yale’s endowment spent $480 million paying its hedge fund managers last year and $170 million on its students.

—————

I was going to donate money to Yale. But maybe it makes more sense to mail a check directly to the hedge fund of my choice.

—————

Why doesn’t Yale spin off its university division and concentrate on its core money management business?

—————

It came down to helping the poor or giving the world’s richest university $400 mil it doesn’t need. Wise choice John!

[John Paulson Gives $400 Million to Harvard for Engineering School

The gift from Mr. Paulson, a billionaire hedge fund manager, is the largest in the university’s history.]

—————-

If billionaires don’t step up, Harvard will soon be down to its last $30 billion.