… features horrendous University of Hawaii.

… on two triple word squares (she plays online Scrabble).

The word: EXPURGED.

Her score for that move: 230.

Her score for the game: 592.

(She made another seven-letter [STYLINGS] using one triple word square in the move just after EXPURGED. 110 points.)

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Update: Sorry. The link on EXPURGED takes you only to the Scrabble site, not to the page with scores and words. I guess you have to be a member to get to that page.

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More Snapshots from Home:

I discovered, this morning, a big, beautiful spider web hanging from my dogwood tree. After a night of rain, the web is bejeweled, studded with water.

I’m a bad photographer, and I certainly can’t do justice to this delicate sight; but here’s what it looks like.

But just immense; and instead of the black background in the linked picture, imagine a cascade of the sharp coppery leaves of an autumn dogwood as the web’s setting.

UD has covered similar professor meltdowns, but usually they’re about alcohol or drug use. This one, a math professor at Michigan State who paced his classroom, slammed his head into the window, shouted obscenities at his students, shouted about there being no God, and then stripped naked – looks to have been a pretty classic psychotic break.

Students madly dialed 911; they claim police took too long (fifteen minutes) to arrive, but there seems to be some controversy about that. What’s not controversial is that these students were badly traumatized (some feared the professor might have a weapon).

It’s hellishly difficult to identify mad or dangerous or badly addicted people on campus. I’ve only had one student, in years of teaching, who was immediately identifiable as mentally ill by her class behavior and comments (I told someone in administration about it; the student later withdrew to get treatment). Privacy rights; a tolerance for oddness; denial; fear — lots of factors play into our tendency to avoid doing anything about unsettling behavior. And things are often mixed: Amy Bishop’s students report that she taught quite normally only hours before the faculty meeting during which she murdered three of her colleagues.

Given this difficulty, response time is key.

… next catalogue will put all women in burqas.

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Update: And speaking of burqas: This is precisely the outcome UD and many other observers anticipated. And France will now be a model for other countries who will be banning the burqa.

The University of Tennessee would dearly love to pull the tubing out of the alcohol enema story, but, like Franzia wine over-topping your sphincter, it just keeps circulating. The frat what done it has been suspended (temporarily; anal-opening-awareness workshops are doubtless in the works), but, despite national news coverage that won’t quit, UT’s president seems disinclined to say anything public about the brothers giving each other enemas.

…

Scathing Online Schoolmarm doesn’t know what to say.

George Orwell wasn’t referring to the 2012 [Cleveland] Browns when he wrote that progress is “slow and invariably painful.”

Orwell died in 1950. The Browns were good back then.

But the great writer’s words sure do apply to a franchise whose fits have far outnumbered its starts since it returned from NFL exile in 1999.

Watching the Browns’ attempts at improvement have been painful. Painful like gout, if gout also came with the flu, a bad rash and a nasty hangover.

There’s been nothing particularly not painful about it, not the turnstile of failed coaches, not the heap of discarded quarterbacks, not a soccer-crazed owner.

Says here that Indiana’s Vincennes University has the distinction of having graduated not one person among those who’ve attended for four years.

Says here that au contraire Vincennes is graduating (drum roll) 24% of such people. Although it’s not clear that this second list is based on four years of attendance. It might be six.

This is a public university, so the taxpayers of Indiana can wile away these lovely early autumn afternoons contemplating the yield on their investment.

… all lit up this weekend.

This poem by Jane Kenyon, titled “Alone for a Week,” demonstrates the weird, affecting, tightly-packed emotional power of the short, subtly rhymed, lyric. Read the poem intact here; I pick it apart below. (For another example of the suggestive power of the well-conceived short lyric, go here.)

I washed a load of clothes
and hung them out to dry.
Then I went up to town
and busied myself all day.

[Load/clothes. Dry/day. There’s a simple, almost singsongy feel to these opening lines. But the rhyme and assonance are subtle; and perhaps the almost entirely monosyllabic words have more to do with sadness and emptiness – an inability to say much under the circumstances – than with simple songs.]

The sleeve of your best shirt
rose ceremonious
when I drove in; our night-
clothes twined and untwined in
a little gust of wind.

[Rose/drove/clothes/ceremonious: She’s working that lamenting open O. As she returns from town she looks at the clothesline on which the clothes are bouncing in the wind. The sleeve of her absent husband’s shirt rises to greet her. His best shirt; he puts on his best to greet his beloved wife. At least she sees things this way – a way of conveying how strongly she misses him, her imagination and yearning animating his clothing, willing him somehow to be there. our night- / clothes twined and untwined… A passionate couple, a passionate image. She moves from his solitary ceremonious greeting to the two of them entwined.]

For me it was getting late;
for you, where you were, not.
The harvest moon was full
but sparse clouds made its light
not quite reliable.

See the delicate scheme of almost rhymes? The way so many of these lines end on a light, tentative T? Late/not/light. Tentative T, its recurrence somehow carrying a sense of her fragility, her condition of sensitive waiting, of gingerly moving in the world, of trying to busy herself in the absence of her lover. Even the condition of being in different time zones seems to her full of pathos, mystery, and a touch of the grotesque: How can we, so close, be so astronomically apart? That full harvest moon will carry the real freight of her fright (harvest/sparse; light/quite — still working the rhyme and assonance), because here in the countryside it should cast a full rounded light, a species of reassurance, the two of them a passionate fullness. But under the clouds it’s unreliable; and so she feels uncertain in her life, separate, unsteady on her feet.

And now for her wonderful final lines, as she moves inside and tries to go to sleep.

The bed on your side seemed
as wide and flat as Kansas;
your pillow plump, cool,
and allegorical…

Allegorical! Talk about ending on a great word.

Let’s see: First off, notice all of those Ls: flat/pillow/plump/cool, and then allegorical, all plumped with Ls. The move from T to L makes all kinds of sense as she stops trying to tap out a busy moment-to-moment life and sinks into la-la land, languor, lullaby land, Lethe, the land of liquid Ls. Flat and Kansas (how long and dull the distances between us!) will do for assonance; and we have a full final rhyme, cool/allegorical. The pillow unflattened and unwarmed by his head, but so rich with his having been on it, with his not being on it, lies beside her madly transmitting meanings – madly allegorical as in say the allegory of the cave in which she subsists, darkly, her fantasy willing the cloudy inanimate world to materialize her lover…

Duh. If you don’t think tons of people knew and happily enabled academic fraud at the University of North Carolina, I have a Thomas Petee independent study to show you.

Nyang’oro came to UNC in 1984 as a visiting assistant professor and became the African studies department’s chairman in 1992. University officials now admit he never received a review from a supervisor since he was elevated to that position …

Deniability is a beautiful thing. Until you can’t deny anymore.

By the way – UD has always been a big fan of online course evaluations. And this story reveals one of the reasons why.

Evidence shows that some non-athletes who enrolled in the classes did so unwittingly and were dumbfounded to find the class only consisted of a paper assignment.

One such student commented about the Spring 2010 AFRI 370 no-show class on a course evaluation website known as Koofers.

“I am taking the course by submitting a paper with Prof. Nyang’oro and it is a bit daunting,” said the student, who was not identified, in a comment posted in April 2010, long before the scandal was uncovered. “It has to be between 20-25 pages. I wish I was able to take the actual course with him.”

Faculty and administrators too hoitsy or whatever to read course evaluations might want to look at them occasionally. Had anyone at UNC bothered, they would have read, a year before the scandal broke, a description of the AFAM fraud.

There’s one other intriguing angle to this story, and I wonder if it’s true of other jockshops. All the tutors mentioned in this article were women. Fraud gals. Fraud fraus. Why? Soft hearts? Easily manipulated?

Just ’cause your point of pride don’t involve steaming piles of shit on campus for days after a game don’t mean our point of pride don’t involve that!

We’re Texas State, and look what we can do!

Texas State: The Rising Smell of Texas.

… a student at Utica College – an award-winning hockey player in high school – is charged with having beaten his girlfriend – a College at Brockport student – to death in her dorm room.

This is breaking news. University Diaries will cover the story as it develops.

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Update: The story has quickly jumped to the Associated Press.

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Unverified details suggest some more similarities to the Virginia lacrosse case: The boyfriend is rumored to have been drinking with friends before he went to the woman’s dorm room; the couple is said to have had a stormy relationship with a lot of fighting; there is a suggestion that she may have tired of the relationship and tried to end it.

Unverified details of the attack are also similar. As in the Yeardley Love case, this woman was battered to death.

There are also rumors that the killer knocked out the woman’s roommate by hitting her with an iron.

And like Love’s killer, this suspect has a drunk and disorderly arrest on his record.

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Students are not being held in the dorm, but many have been seen leaving the hall with parents, as well as some with full backpacks and purses.

SUNY Brockport’s newspaper suddenly has a big story on its hands, and so far is doing an excellent job, providing incident-by-incident updates. Its journalists are best-situated to convey a sense of the feel of the campus in the immediate aftermath of a murder. And yes – of course those parents are swarming to take their kids out of that bloody building.

The national media is all agog about the University of Tennessee’s butt chuggers. Google Tennessee Enema and you’ll get pages and pages of the sort of coverage other universities can only dream about.

As UD‘s father liked to say: Rectum? Damn near killed ’em.

This student makes some good suggestions, but when your university is basically a football team plus block after city block of bars, you have to expect violence. And all the drunken fights and gunshots the other night were after the University of South Carolina won its game.

Of course you can bear down with incredible numbers of police (the area already has security cameras everywhere), so that in the days following the mobs you arrest some people and try to scare other people — in anticipation of the next game, which is against Georgia. Yeah, you heard that right: Georgia. Get ready to roll.

The 7 p.m. kickoff for the Georgia game will add to his department’s challenge, [the police chief] said. Crowds always are larger and more rowdy after night games because they have been tailgating for hours before the games.

So on the Thursday after the post-victory violence, the police picked up a couple of University of South Carolina students just doing the sort of harmless hijinks you associate with college kids out at night:

The arrests, one for unlawful carrying of a pistol and resisting arrest, the other for hit-and-run and drug possession, follow a particularly violent weekend in Five Points in which two men were injured in mob assaults and a woman’s car was damaged by gunfire after the Gamecocks’ victory over the Missouri Tigers Sept. 22 at Williams-Brice Stadium.

Haha the old unlawful carrying of a pistol and hit and run! Kids today!

Durkheim’s observation plays out in a moving way in the university (or high school) setting, where students and former students may choose places on campus associated with their greatest successes or most significant experiences.

A sixty year old guy who’d been named “the University of Montana’s outstanding athlete in 1975″ killed himself on that campus. Nora Miller, a Wesleyan track star, killed herself on the track.

A football player who’d been at the University of South Carolina went not there but “to his old high school and parked near the field where he had starred as a wide receiver in football and a sprinter in track and field.”

In the local paper, a geology professor defends his work.

I must respond to the recent letter to the editor by Ms. Meredith Berg strongly critical of my upcoming talk at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls on St. Croix Valley geology. … Ms. Berg is correct that I will not be spending time on a young-earth or Biblical flood model for the St. Croix Valley. In my 50 years of studying and doing geology here and around the world I have not seen a shred of geological evidence for this, and it would do my audience a disservice to spend time on it.