Thirteen arrests, fifteen wins. They are almost at parity. Something for the school to – er – shoot for.

A [Central Connecticut State University] professor has been placed on administrative suspension, without pay.

Last week, Ravi Shankar was arrested for the third time this past year for stealing from a Home Depot. In December he was arrested twice–once for driving with a suspended license, and once for evading responsibility for an accident that he fled from. Both of those cases are still pending.

Before that he had previous convictions for two DUIs, operating with a suspended license, reckless driving over 85 mph, interfering with police, giving police false statements in a credit card fraud scheme and violating his probation. He served a 90-day sentence broken up into several periods.

The controversy came to a head when he was promoted to a full professorship while he was in jail serving time for his convictions.

Drinking tea in New York City.

Peru’s leading newspaper said it will no longer publish editorials by the cardinal and archbishop of Lima after accusing him of plagiarizing past popes in his articles.

… Juan Luis Cipriani … copied portions of the book “Communio,” written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict XVI, and of the encyclical “Ecclesiam Suam,” written by Pope Paul VI in two of his editorials.

… He suggested to listeners of his radio program, “Dialogues of Faith,” that the newspaper’s response was “revenge” for his inflexible opposition to abortion and gay marriage…

In February, [Norwood] Teague paid $750 for a limousine to transport nine donors and three staff while in Bloomington, Ind., during a Gophers men’s basketball game against Indiana. “Our priority was to keep the group together and multiple stops need to be made. The reserved vehicle provided more reliability than trying to find multiple cabs near the basketball arena following the game,” Teague’s report stated.

Your education taxes at work.

How to approach the delicate topic of football culture and the gifts it has given the American university? It’s not merely the obvious stuff – the pointless stupid scary violence that scads of sports heroes like Richie Incognito bring to campus (idle Google Newsing turns up the latest helmet-bashing-in-the-campus-locker-room, this one at the University of Delaware, where last February another player “was charged with assaulting three other students at a party.”).

This violence has turned professors into police:

Days after the incident, [an Oregon State student who got beaten by team members] said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.

The violence is hard-wired, of course, into the coaching of both university football and basketball, so that on a routine basis latter-day Bobby Knights are filmed and parodied (start at 1:15). The coaches are quickly replaced, sometimes by women, who are symbolically part of the clean-up routine cuz you know women just want to mother the team and would never be violent…

In fact, let’s pause there and think about the incredibly important role of women in big-time university sports. I don’t mean merely as tools of recruitment (several schools attract players via, er, dates with carefully selected female students), and objects of rape, assault, and harassment (see, most recently, the Norwood Teague unpleasantness at the University of Minnesota). And I don’t mean merely the importance of trotting out mom, post-assault, on Good Morning America. (Or, as Matt Hayes puts it, “GMA’s utterly repulsive decision to allow De’Andre Johnson on television to apologize for punching a woman in the face.”)

I mean, think about Donna Shalala’s tenure as president of Miami University. Her main role was as cover for a team that got in big on-field brawls and whose best buddy was Nevin Shapiro. She was like the Good Morning America mom times a hundred. They kept wheeling Shalala out to apply the back of her hand to her naughty charges, and this routine actually worked for a while.

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A local commentator asks incredulously where the University of Minnesota found the likes of Teague (the answer is that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a search firm). “Were the other finalists Bill Cosby and Donald Sterling?”

Donald Sterling, Zygi (“bad faith and evil motive”) Wilf, these are the guys who give professional basketball and football such a great name… And, as the commentator suggests, there’s not a lot of discernible difference between professional and big-time university football. Even in the matter of violence, there’s the NFL…

In the N.F.L., … fits of violence hardly blacklist players chasing roster spots. The day after punching [Geno] Smith, [Ikemefuna] Enemkpali latched on with the Buffalo Bills, whose new coach, Rex Ryan, has created a haven for wayward players…

(What a sweet, Victorian, girly way of putting it! A haven for wayward players! Like Ikemefuna’s teammate, the aforementioned Richie Incognito! The way Jane Addams created a haven for wayward girls! SWEET.)

… and there’s college ball, where getting kicked out for violence means the same thing it meant for Ikemefuna – you just find another team.

All of which is why, as UD has often recommended, universities with big-time football need football coaches, not academics, as presidents. (See Jim Tressel.) In a pinch, a politician will do. You could also go with a figurehead, a Queen Elizabeth to Nick Saban’s prime minister. But you’ll keep getting stories like the one coming out of the University of Minnesota as long as you take some guy – some random polite reflective well-meaning university denizen – and hand him the management of what is essentially a professional football team.

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The petri dish for university football culture is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their new field design is all about Vegas. A sample headline:

UNLV REBELS WILL BE PLAYING FOOTBALL ON ONE BIG CRAPS TABLE IN 2015

“The team’s field and uniforms now reek of the Strip — it’s glitz, gold, gambling and most importantly, its promise of future fortunes.”

This is a team with one of the worst records in university football. An appalling record. Very few people show up to their games. Season tickets sold last year: 3,890. In response, the university decided to build a $900 million, 55,000 seat stadium with an Adzillatron spanning the length of the field. Although they’ve cut back on that original plan, they’ll surely come up with something like it. And they’ve got yet another miracle coach who’s going to shock everybody with the greatest comeback story this side of Elvis.

… for UD‘s garden…

… is a gift from UD‘s sister,
the (increasingly famous)
Morrissey fanatic.

UD thanks La Kid
for taking the pic.

Giving Donald Trump some competition.

Ah, a walk down memory lane. This is from a 2010 AAUP report expressing dismay at Phyllis Wise (then a high-ranking administrator at the University of Washington) following in the footsteps of UW’s then president Mark Emmert (who as current head of the farcical NCAA makes far far FAR bigger bucks than he did on all of his presidential corporate boards) and displaying her I could give a shit greed to the world.

To Wise’s claim that Nike’s board was interested in her special expertise in their line of work, the AAUP responded:

It is difficult to see what special interest the Nike Corporation could possibly have in Phyllis Wise’s research expertise in obstetrics and gynecology.

Er… How to screw your employees?…

UD is therefore SOOOO not surprised that Wise is insisting on leaving her latest place of employment with every penny coming to her.

One day after the board of trustees rejected her first attempt, the former UI chancellor again tendered her resignation Thursday night, saying she would not accept a position as special assistant to the president and that she is consulting with her lawyers about ways to protect her reputation…

‘[T]he University agreed to provide the compensation and benefits to which I was entitled, including $400,000 in deferred compensation that was part of my 2011 employment contract.’

I want it all! You think by changing your mind and ‘terminating’ instead of retiring me you can avoid yet more ridicule (the University of Illinois has generated tons of that over the last few years) about the four hundred thou reward for the way I handled Salaita and other matters?

YOU CAN’T FIRE ME. I RESIGN. I RESIGN AGAIN. I RESIGN AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

It’s what Kierkegaard called infinite resignation:

Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.

As Wise embarks on her spiritual journey, the rest of us can giggle at the spectacle (see this post, about comedy and repetition) of Wise and her university tossing the terminate/resign ball back and forth. At great expense to Illinois taxpayers, of course.

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UD thanks Wendy.

But mainly Pop Store – a rattling down-home establishment somewhere in West Virginia where behind a rotting wooden counter “Pops,” aka Gregory A. Hand, dean of the West Virginia University School of Public Health, “hands” out, if you will, all the soda pop America’s perennially top party school – and the rest of that benighted state – desires.

Eating really bad shit and then washing the shit (and your pain pills) down with Coke is a popular West Virginia tradition, and you gotta hand it to Hand: From his perch in that state’s school of public health he can do a great deal to honor and sustain the tradition.

[WVU] disclosed that Coca-Cola had provided significant funding to Dr. Hand … The company gave him $806,500 for an “energy flux” study in 2011 and $507,000 last year to establish the [Coke-funded] Global Energy Balance Network.

It is unclear how much of the [Coke] money, if any, ended up as personal income for the professors.

“As long as everybody is disclosing their potential conflicts and they’re being managed appropriately, that’s the best that you can do,” Dr. Hand said. “It makes perfect sense that companies would want the best science that they can get.”

Absolutely! Absolutely! With the understanding that definitions of “best” may vary depending on… Well, let’s just say that when a big fat multinational like Coke scours the world and finds the best science in Pop’s lab at West Virginia University…

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UD has a suggestion for Hand’s campaign in West Virginia:

OVERDOSES GO BETTER WITH COKE

Ashamed? Ashamed? ASHAMED???

(Say it out loud like Bracknell saying A HANDBAG???)

What is happening to this country? People at Harvard Business School are ashamed to admit they were like this with great Americans like Lloyd Blankfein, Squido di Tutti Squidi? This country is about to elect as President a proud graduate of Wharton, the BIZnessest biz school in the world, and current students at HBS are ashamed of having worked in an investment bank? What the hell is that? Can it be that the, uh, symbolic value of people Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, and pretty boy Dick Fuld and his merry men is declining?

It’s partly the fault of those goddamn case studies.

“There are several case studies dealing with investment banks wherein students discuss the brutal work environment and incredibly out-of-whack work-life balance,” [said one observer]. “The banks’ efforts — their success or lack thereof — to bring about change have not been discussed, but what is consistently highlighted is the dark side of investment banks.”

What to do?

Big banks are fighting back, promising recruits more hours to sleep, the occasional day off and reasonable deadlines. The effort, prompted by the death of a Bank of America Corp. intern in 2013, is driven in part by fear that the brightest students no longer see investment banking as a sustainable career. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. invited celebrity author Deepak Chopra to talk to its staff a few months ago about wellness, relaxation and the value of vacation.

Deepak! Deepak baby! Teach them how not to die!

Just wanted to grab that clever headline before anyone else thought of it.

They’re bringing Adzillatrons to high school football, not just college. A few stragglers haven’t yet gotten with the program.

[H]ere’s what high school football is not:

A $200,000 Jumbotron scoreboard, one with booming sound and full of advertisements, like the one they are proposing for Manatee High this season.

… [M]aybe people don’t want to be screamed at all the time. Maybe people don’t want to be sold something everywhere they go.

A teeny $200,000 Adzillatron! That’s mere practice for the $13 million Adzillatron you’ll get in college. You think a $200,000 screen is screaming at you? Hahahahaha.

Today’s announcement of the “biggest case of insider trading linked to the fast-growing threat of global cybercrime” is red meat to ol’ UD, who loves her some high-level hypocrisy.

Admittedly, the arrest of a Pat Robertson-trained preacher for his part in “an alliance of U.S.-based stock traders and computer hackers in Ukraine [which] made as much as $100 million in illegal profits over five years after stealing confidential corporate press releases” lacks the panache of Yeshiva University’s Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin – they, uh, handled far more money – but this apparent graduate of Regent University’s online (I assume he did these online) MBA and Divinity degrees certainly does know how to use computers, for school and for work.

He was described in this way a few years ago in some SEC correspondence:

Mr. Korchevsky holds a B.A. degree from Sukhumi University, Sukhumi, Georgia, a M.Div. degree from Regent University and an M.B.A. from Regent University.

You can watch oodles of YouTubes of Korchevsky preaching if you’d like. Helps to know Ukrainian. Just put his name in the search engine.

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Update: A local paper calls it “an incongruous mix of Christianity and criminality.”

Really? How incongruous is the use of religion as a cover for crime? I think the word the reporter is going for is congruous.

Well, UD did her own small turtle-reclamation bit this morning while walking her dog along Rokeby Avenue. A turtle was simply standing there in the middle of the street. While trying to decide whether to pick it up, UD watched as through pure dumb luck it survived two cars passing over it.

One of her neighbors came by. Let her do it!

“How do you feel about picking up turtles?”

“I’m fine with it.”

UD gestured downward. Her neighbor scooped it. “They say,” she said, “you’re supposed to take them to the direction they were walking in.” She even knew shit like that!

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

Update: Well, it’s Nature Day for ol’ UD. She just watched a rare bald cardinal thoroughly soaking itself in her Black Eyed Susan Vine Buddha Birdbath. Looked like this.