The University of Michigan: Cheesy.
The University of Michigan: Cheesy.
Shocking. Wins on the field, we’re always told, translate into wins at the admissions office… Yet in one of our most educationally pathetic states, Florida State University is the worst of the lot…
So what they need as president is a man who, as FSU board chair, pushed for a chiropractic school there (he was shouted down by legitimate scientists), and who has been a pretty routine pretty corrupt politician for America’s most corrupt state.
John Thrasher has now been elected president of Florida State University. When he was one of the finalists, he met with students.
Asked about evolution, Sen. Thrasher talked about his religious beliefs, saying: “I have a great faith in my life that has guided me in my life in a lot of things I believe in.” The implication is that science and faith cannot co-exist.
Sen. Thrasher also declined to give a specific answer when asked about the science behind climate change, and then threatened to walk out of the room when two students giggled at his answers…
You and I know that the most important problem with Thrasher’s answer isn’t that, at a university, he refuses to discuss (is incapable of discussing?) evolution and climate change. It’s that any institution that thinks someone who can barely speak English should be its president needs to have its head examined.
… and in some of our dumber states it can sometimes work. It was well on its way toward happening at the University of Virginia until people started noticing, and the state’s prison-bound governor got involved.
High schools are particularly vulnerable to boards of trustees stuffed with ideologues determined to turn the schools into propaganda venues.
In response to student protest in one Colorado district, the board president has responded with characteristic condescension:
“I would rather be able to do those things without conflict, but at the end of the day, it’s very important that we align with those goals,” he said.
We’d love it if the revolution could be bloodless, but one way or another, historical inevitability being what it is, these kids will learn what’s good for them.
And other countries, other municipalities, around the world, are banning the woman-annihilating burqa.
In Australia, growing numbers of people and politicians – like Liberal MP George Christiansen, from whom I’ve taken this post’s headline – are calling for a burqa ban.
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UPDATE: And, as is usually the case, polls suggest a comfortable majority of Australians favor a ban.
… that’s doing the place in. So what if their athletic director (who came in to fix what their sadist-on-wheels basketball coach did to the school’s rep – it became, among other things, a notorious Saturday Night Live joke – and then turned out to have her own apparently sadistic past), so what if she told her staff to reach out and touch people in the community, but “not in a Jerry Sandusky-type way.”
In itself, this remark is nothing. But in context, it’s just this week’s shabby Rutgers Thing, part of a narrative involving a school giving all of its money to athletics, run by a ridiculously greedy new president, fronted by hilariously obscene fans, coached by cretins…
… at the death of a student at my campus. William Gwathmey came from a loving, accomplished New York family, and was on his way in the world too.
Gwathmey’s official cause of death has not been determined because a report by the D.C. Chief Medical Examiner’s office is not yet complete. The junior had used cocaine and drank alcohol the night before his death, according to a Metropolitan Police Department report. After going out to several nightclubs that night, Gwathmey returned to an apartment at The Residences at the Ritz-Carlton on 23rd Street, where he was later found unconscious on a couch, according to the report.
“[Heisman voters] gave him the benefit of the doubt last season when he was accused of — but not charged with — rape. It’s unlikely that they will give him the same leeway after first being caught stealing and, now, after shouting obscenities into a microphone.”
FSU: It’s all good. Only way to make it better is to dispense with what’s left of the pretense of academics altogether.
And dammit! Let them have their chiropractic school! Somebody’s gotta bind up all them wounds.
…but many of our universities.
We idolize players of a game that champions aggression and violence. Their [way of life is] dependent on their ability to run fast, throw far and hit very hard. They are so dependent on this lifestyle that [several of them] no longer have the ability to control the aggression for which they are revered.
Lots of professional sports are scummy and are dominated by front and back office scumsters (Lance Armstrong dominated cycling for decades, Zygi Wilf continues to own the Vikings, etc.) and UD finds this unsurprising.
Yet everyone is unsettled by the particular case of football.
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Almost all cultures enjoy violent spectacles; America’s a notably violent culture; America has immense wealth to use toward refining and enlarging the spectacles.
It does seem, however, that even Americans have some breadth and scope of violence limits. Football’s unapologetic violence – highly financially rewarded violence – is getting so out of hand that people are beginning to boycott games, broadcasts, and sponsors.
None of this should surprise. People have a gag reflex, and football is making more and more people gag.
What should surprise people – and UD has no idea why it doesn’t – is the fact that this same culture of make-me-puke violence has come to dominate quite a number of our most high-profile universities.
Universities! Think of what they are! And think about what – to use one example – the University of Nebraska actually is! This is one of many universities that fought hard to recruit (although his story broke not at all long ago, you’ve already probably forgotten about this guy – he’s been overwhelmed by subsequent football violence stories) Richie Incognito, a notorious head case long before he applied to college. UN not only didn’t care – it debased itself in every imaginable way to get him.
A touch of collateral damage on campus and in town? Who gives a shit about our students’ welfare?
And UN professors? Where were the professors?
One of them, recently hired, describes the academic culture:
“Would you like seasons tickets for the faculty cheering section in the football stadium?” [the department secretary] asked.
“No thank you,” I said, effectively ending my social life at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t realize it wasn’t a question but an imperative. Faculty members were expected to wear sweaters with the school colors and hold up colored pieces of cardboard to spell out, in giant letters, eternal verities like: “Hold That Line!”
Universities wonder why on game day their student sections are emptying out… Why students either don’t show up at all, or trail in drunk after awhile, try to focus their eyes on the game a bit, and then trail out well before the game is over. Expensive experts have been called in to reverse the situation, and they’ve told universities to sell liquor in the stadium, to provide wifi, to offer money bribes, etc. But universities should look at professional football. Professional football is making a lot of people sick, and it ain’t got nothin’ to do with wifi. And then universities should look at universities. Even the deadest dead head who attends university has a rough sense of the difference between a university and the mass culture outside of the university. It’s time universities themselves got a sense of this too.
Every month, UD links you to her reporting (“A Town’s Work is Never Done”) on the town of Garrett Park’s town council meeting for the Garrett Park Bugle. Here tis.
…to offer a poetry course next March through April, and she has happily accepted. Each session will be a close reading of an important poem. I’ll start with Romantic odes, then move on to Victorian, modern, and postmodern poetry. So there will be a dual focus: Changes in poetry from era to era, and intensive analysis of style and content.
As the date approaches, UD will announce details to any of her local readers that might be interested.
The techno-paranoid part of this (covering up the webcam) is postmodern; but the metanarrative hasn’t shifted in ages: Professors exchange A’s for sex and/or professors threaten F’s for no sex…
This particular case of purported sexual harassment, at the University of Delaware, seems to have been handled way quickly and quietly, with the professor (apparently nailed by his own emails – he thought to throw a cloth over the camera but not to avoid communications full of incriminating statements) scooting asap…
Yet now it’s not quiet at all on the University of Delaware campus. Now there are rallies with hundreds of students and faculty protesting what they see as the university’s lack of transparency on sexual harassment.
… often exhibit spectacular sleaze synergy.
Take assistant-coach-assaulting Tommy Tuberville, late of pain slut Texas Tech, now bringing his expensive brand of physical violence (plus Ponzi schemes!) to University of Cincinnati football. When this person has to deal with violent players on the Cincinnati team… Well, who’s gonna make the … Shall we call it the Roger Goodell sermon? About how violence is bad bad bad and we have really high standards of personal conduct here…
There’s nobody to make the sermon but the coach, and at Cincinnati the coach is a dumbfuck who smacks his staff on camera… So when gunplay breaks out among team members and some of them try to run away from the police, etc., etc., there’s stinky ol’ Tuberville instructing America on moral purity…
“This kind of behavior is not acceptable and not indicative of the UC football program,” Tuberville said. “Moving forward, we will continue to educate our players on making good decisions and being great representatives of the University.”
Amen Brother Tommy. Tell us how we can be more like you.
“In July 1999, the little girl who had seen her mother’s credit card scissored became a tenured law professor with all the associated stature and job security.”
This blog is authored by the daughter of a suicide – a man who, like Vermont Law School’s Cheryl Hanna, had one of the world’s great jobs (he was a branch chief at NIH who did cancer research) as well as family happiness (Hanna told an interviewer “I was sort of getting to that point in life where it probably wasn’t going to happen… Now I have this crazy family. I thought I was just going to have a career.”) – and University Diaries has from its beginning discussed both particular university suicides and the larger national problem of suicide (most recently Robin Williams’ death has had people thinking about it).
In this nicely written brief review of Hanna’s sad and traumatic youth, and then her socially committed, successful academic career, UD senses the same complex mix of painful early years and strikingly successful adult years that characterized her father’s life. There’s also the same strange onset of a total determination to die (her husband describes “the rapid onset and severity of Hanna’s depression”) on the part of a person everyone recalls as – in the words of a colleague – “a vibrant, enthusiastic person who was fun to be around.”
“People seemed to run out of their own being,” Philip Roth writes in one of his novels, as his character tries to figure out why even people with what look like great lives kill themselves. It is an odd thought – that just as each of us is given a physical life of a certain length, so each of us has a — call it a spiritual allotment…
… has some great comments about university football in this News Hour interview:
… [I]f people begin to say that football is the new cigarettes, and you’re starting to hear that, if people begin to think that football isn’t just tax subsidies — the governor of Minnesota says he’s embarrassed by the Vikings’ treatment of Adrian Peterson…
What you should really be embarrassed about [is the] half-a-billion dollars of taxpayers’ money that the governor of Minnesota gave to the Wilf brothers to build the stadium in which they will keep all of the profits. If people become more aware of those issues, if football becomes perceived as a woman’s issue — nobody saw that coming — and especially if football — people turn their attention to the fact that the vast majority of football is played at the youth and high school level by people who legally are children, that’s where the health harm of football is done.
If public high schools begin to drop out of playing football — and there is some indication they will — that over a period of years could change the NFL’s economics very radically.
… I call [football] the king of sports because it expresses what we are as a nation. It’s too loud, it’s too crazy, it’s too violent…
But when you add the sociological impact, the distorting effect that it has on high school education, mainly for boys, for a few girls, but mainly for boys, the distorting effect that it has, … that NCAA football has at big public universities, and then add in that the public subsidizes the production of NFL profit — roughly a billion dollars a year goes to subsidize the construction and operation of NFL stadiums — where almost all the revenue generated is kept by the super rich, you have these sociological impacts…
America’s public universities: Violence, sleaze, and greed, or non-violence, class, and restraint?
No contest.
But then, you also get to contemplate the glorious history of other Yeshiva trustees besides Zygi Wilf, like Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, if you go to Yeshiva University.
Yes it’s a fine school, a religious school, and you know that “religious” means a finer moral compass…
But wait… What’s this headline?…
The Broken Moral Compass of Vikings Owners Mark and Zygi Wilf
This morning, after seeing which way the wind was blowing, the Wilfs released another statement, finding other principles that allowed them to cave in to the backlash against the Vikings. After “further reflection” and input they “appreciate and value” from the community – not to mention the loss of sponsors such as Radisson and Nike pulling AP jerseys off its shelves – they suddenly realized getting Adrian Peterson away from the team was actually what he wanted: “Adrian emphasized his desire to avoid further distraction to his teammates and coaches while focusing on his current situation; this resolution accomplishes these objectives as well.”
Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, the Wilfs continue to stall, delaying payments to the two partners who sued them in 1992. Apparently, 22 years is not quite enough “due process” for the Wilfs, who were already upbraided by the judge in uncommonly harsh language, when she found against them and said they acted with “bad faith and evil motive.” Nevertheless, the Wilfs have engineered yet another delay in paying the nearly $100 million ($84.1 million in damages plus $15.1 million in attorneys’ fees) for what the Star-Ledger describes as having “cheated their partners … for more than 20 years.”
Yeshiva University: Its main accomplishment in the last few years has been avoiding legal responsibility for what everyone agrees was decades of sexual abuse of their high school students. Now there’s something to be proud of! Meanwhile, there’s the likes of Zygi Wilf on their board of trustees; there’s the school’s abysmal Moody’s rating…