… [US Rep. George] Holding and the rest of North Carolina’s congressional delegation have said little about the UNC scandal, which experts say is the worst academic scandal they’ve seen in NCAA history.
Asked in early 2014 about the scandal, Holding declined to comment through a spokesperson.
… Holding said Wednesday that Congress is too broken to fix the issues in college sports that have landed the state’s flagship campus in a major academic scandal.
“Congress is broken, we have a lot on our plate,” Holding, a Raleigh Republican, said in a visit to The News & Observer’s offices. “If we can’t fix the things that are solidly within our jurisdiction I have a hard time believing that we can figure out how to fix college sports.”
Hey yeah y’all leave it be we’re too broken to take on anything as awesome as fixing college sports we’re just tryin’ to get the lilac trimmed on this here Capitol building…
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My opinion is that the [new Vikings] stadium is going quite a bit over budget in order to fulfill everything the team wants out of the building.
Sid Hartman, Minnesota Star Tribune.
I mean, by prevailing standards.
[Herbert] Gamboa and his fellow returning starting [University of Montana] linebackers, Kendrick Van Ackeren and Jeremiah Kose, were expected to be a strong point in the Griz defense against a vaunted NDSU team that has gone 58-3 in the past four seasons. Both Gamboa and Kose had scrapes with the law last week, though.
Kose, 22, was arrested last Wednesday on a failure to appear charge regarding three moving violations from last November. Kose participated in Tuesday’s practice and is expected to play against the Bison later this month…
Gamboa, 21, was arrested early Friday morning after witnesses saw him challenging other people to fight outside a Maurice Avenue house party at about 12:30 a.m.
He pleaded guilty Monday in Missoula Municipal Court to one disorderly conduct charge, a misdemeanor, and received a six-month deferred sentence.
Better put an armed guard on Van Ackeren.
… for Phyllis Wise’s latest achievement: As the recently appointed chancellor of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she has, in four short years, shepherded her school to Number One on the nation’s top party school list.
Background on Wise, whose jocklove also contributed to her school’s triumph, here.
I’m sure they miss her at the University of Washington.
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UD thanks John.
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Update on her winning faculty recruitment strategies.
… (insignia here) keeps getting its siphoning system disrupted. In the good old days, government-money-funneling enabled its academic officers to make salaries in the tens of millions, but now – after destroying the lives of scores of dupes – the well is drying up. Things will be fine again once President Trump (himself a university president) takes office; but for now, Phoenix is enduring an “endless stream of bad news” (UD thanks Wendy for the link) in the form of business practice investigations, new rules about how you can’t take student money and say thanks fuck off, etc.
And that’s Phoenix. That’s the classiest of the for-profit ed tax-siphon lot. You can imagine how the rats are deserting at, say, DeVry, where, for instance, after collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for trading on his reputable past, the disgraced Harold Shapiro got his ass out while the getting was good.
UD loves to chronicle the intellectual life of her beloved country, as it plays out in our universities.
U President Vows to Push for Stadium Liquor Sales, for instance, is a headline that says so much about the preoccupations of our highest-ranked academic officers; and then there’s the University of Houston’s leader – Coach Herman – whose threatening language to UH students about their unwillingness to attend football games makes us all wonder what he plans to do if they continue to act like students rather than fans.
UD totally understands the coach’s desperate rhetoric: UH just spent $128 million on a new 40,000-seat stadium, and at best it’s half-filled on game day. Of that half, I’m figuring not many are students, and, well, the conceit here is that university football has something to do with university students. Like, the university is giving students this incredible experience – Adzillatrons shrieking ads at them, drunks with guns, I dunno, but IT’S TEXAS for god’s sake where up north a tad from Houston they spent sixty mill on a high school football stadium that has never been used because of structural flaws and no one seems to mind about that! Build another one!
So what’ll coach do? Bring in the Attorney General! But no – the AG’s a Baylor man, and anyways he’s gonna be (cough) a little too busy to deliver a spanking to the many thousands of Oppositional Defiant Disorder sufferers on the UH campus…
UD thinks the best idea is to perform pre-frontal lobotomies on the noncompliant students. Of course they would have to be sedated first because no one is going to want one. They’ve all read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the lobes are coach’s main enemy here, and the medical school is just sitting there.
UD proposes this tag: A half-empty stadium: Unacceptable. A half-empty brain: Acceptable.
The reality is that UH would only have to perform one, maybe two, for students to get the message.
… Ann Arbor resident Joshua Wade [openly carried a gun] to his little sister’s choir concert…
Cheating is endemic to online courses at all levels and in all settings, as everyone knows.
The only surprise in this case is that someone owned up to it.
… jockshops, as this blog routinely does. It’s another thing to see the inner workings, to get an intimate sense from deep within (kind of like that film UD saw when she was a tyke… Raquel Welch was in it… Takes you inside the human body… Ah yes here it is: Fantastic Voyage, 1966… ), of how universities almost entirely about football actually work.
Drawing your president from team players is a popular first move. If you can’t make a jock president, find a political hack who graduated from your school. Make sure the bulk of your trustees are ex-players or peeing their pants with excitement boosters. Direct almost your entire budget to football.
A state-of-the-art football stadium set [the University of Akron] back $62 million and has yet to return a dime. Attendance is literally the worst in the nation in UA’s division. During the six seasons since InfoCision Stadium opened, the team has 16 wins. That’s $3.9 million per win.
For example.
Within these broad parameters there’s room for improvisation, for a nimble ability to as it were catch the toss when new opportunities arise.
Take Florida’s Jacksonville University. The president, who played baseball for the school, is dealing with the aftermath of the school’s recent decision to give virtually all of its campus-wide “leadership” scholarships to football players. Calling them “leadership” was a smart move, since that removed any pesky academic component; directing them almost entirely away from the non-football-playing student body — “football players accounted for nearly 70 percent of all leadership scholarships available, and 90 percent of the award’s total purse” — was pure genius, the sort of thing you need when “low enrollment numbers at the school [made it hard to] bring in enough athletes to fill out both varsity and junior varsity teams.”
I’m not sure what went wrong there, by the way. Everybody agrees that big sports programs guarantee big enrollment boosts.
So well it’s tragic. Punishments have been forthcoming, they have to come up with another way to pay football players to come to their school, and they’re not going to be able to compete in some playoffs. On the bright side, though, Jacksonville University remains a school exclusively committed to the well-being of its football team.
University football players getting arrested happens all the time. UD really doesn’t know how these lads get their schoolwork done! What with practice sessions and game schedules and drugs and alcohol and guns and smashing people’s faces in… Once you get arrested for some of that, you’re looking at yet more study hall interruption.
But franchement UD has covered SOOOO many of these stories that she now ignores most of them. I mean, she scans the latest articles, in case there’s a new twist on the old tale…
And she’s not sure why, but the Antonio Allen thing at Indiana University has her laughing her ass off. She’s definitely paying attention to that one.
I guess it’s, first, because this dude seems to be one serious professional criminal. He sells a wide variety of serious drugs on the street. He has a serious gun. Because he’s obviously been at this for some time, Coacha Inconsolata (put the term in my search engine if you’re not familiar with it it) has a big problem. He can’t do the whole shocked shocked he was like a son to me I’m inconsolable this must be an aberration he’s young we all make mistakes thing because the player seems to be a veteran dealer. He’s been taped doing his thing.
So the coach makes two moves. One, he calls it an isolated incident. But
This is the third off-field incident involving an IU football player in the past three months. Defensive tackle Ralph Green III was arrested in April on charges of battery, public intoxication and disorderly conduct. Wide receiver Isaac Griffith was arrested last month on charges of driving while intoxicated.
Two: He uses the thing for a kumbaya moment. He’s gathered the lads together to use the arrest as a teaching and bonding moment. After one of coach’s post-arrest inspirational talks, the team’s quarterback says
I think that’s helped us grow. Just kind of, ‘Hey, we’re in this together. We’ve got to link arms.’
There’s a little of this motivational sludge in the aftermath of all bashing and dealing on all university football teams, but IU is laying it on hilariously thick.
Finally, the player himself is majorly into God. The only thing he said to reporters on leaving the courtroom the other day was “God is good,” which, given what’s just happened to him, seems in his case counterintuitive. And there’s this:
Earlier Tuesday, before his arrest, Allen posted a photo on Instagram of him being featured on the cover of a Big Ten 2015 preview magazine. The accompanying caption reads:
“If you knew (where) I came from and all the trouble I was in when I was younger you can see I did a 360 and I am BLESSED thank you GOD.”
God talk is the default move for all of these guys when the shit hits the fan, but UD has never before encountered one of them who broadcasts thanks to God for turning him totally around when he’s still cuddling his Colt and hawking coke.
All of the elements really came together and got crazy on this one. I had to laugh.
One of America’s most violent universities, with an incredible track record of student rioting, seems to recruit its star players with an eye toward that history and tradition.
A recently recruited BMOC – a potential quarterback for the football team, no less – has already showed his stuff on the streets of Greenwich. He’s accused of being part of a gang that beat up a guy standing on a corner waiting for an Uber ride. (Before you read details, please consider the mean streets from which the player came.)
The victim told police the three men had approached and asked for a cigarette. The victim told police he said no because he had only one left…
The Darien man got up and told the men he didn’t want to fight because he was with his girlfriend, police said. Stafford then pushed the man to the ground, and William Rosato kicked him in the head, police said.
The girlfriend tried to intervene but was pushed away by the men…
The victim was bleeding from his mouth and his right arm and had bruises on his face and legs, police said. The girlfriend also had a bruise on her face, police said.
Yeah. He and his friends kicked the shit out of both of them! And you thought beating up women was just a Florida State kind of thing.
When you’ve got U Mass’s track record, the problem is maintaining it. Every year you risk attracting non-violent people to your team. Every year you’ve got to go out of your way to find the sort of person who will fuck up a man and a woman standing on the street waiting for an Uber. It’s the U Mass Way.
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Over to you, Ed Blaguszewski.
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UD loves the hubba-hubba iconography of this police photo. Kind of like this.
… reaches an apotheosis.
No. I’m sure there’s worse to come.
Throwing stones at eight year old girls while calling them whores.
Stabbing openly gay people.
Things are escalating.
I wonder what’s next.
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Clarity about the madness.
But the writer focuses only on a certain sick rhetorical strain in his form of religion. One also needs to reckon with the fact of a political class that appeases madmen in order to stay in power.
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The entire Orthodox community is responsible for this attack when it cultivates a culture of hatred toward fellow Jews…
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It’s time to take the country back from those who would not be averse to a theologically-driven, ISIS-like Jewish state.
It’s probably too late. Israel has let itself be run into the ground by hugely growing numbers of religious fanatics for whom things like Supreme Courts are a joke. Look at the ultra-orthodox demographics. These people – and the children whom they are, despite the existence of a mandatory national curriculum, keeping in ignorance – are the future of Israel. And they deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state. A most Kafkaesque outcome.
Six days after this picture of my
Buddha birdbath with Black Eyed
Susan vine, the thing has indeed
begun to flower.
Note the yellow flower emerging
from the leaves, stage left.
(Click on the picture to enlarge.)
The shiny black stone on the
right – one of my proudest
Rehoboth Beach discoveries –
is there to help train the
vines to converge onto the
Buddha. It gently holds
them down. The idea is to
create a kind of sunny
corona around the Buddha.
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UD thanks La Kid – on her
way to another stay in
Ireland – for taking the
picture.
