UD has found the quintessential university football sentence for the 2013 season.

She doubts she will find a better one, but she’ll keep looking.

… Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America.

If you clicked on its dullsville title, you saw the cover of this hard, thick tome, done up in a style UD calls INSTANT VENERABLE.

UD has read a bit of it — she has not yet brought it home from her office because she has other big books (Ulysses, by James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, for starters) to bring home — but she can report that it is judicious, thorough, and (well, read the intro yourself) dull.

If UD had been president of Harvard, and she were writing a book about universities that she wanted a lot of people to read, she wouldn’t put sentences like this in her introduction:

Parents feel that tuitions are too high and that too little is done to hold down costs.

Parents feel… They feel… They don’t think, or believe, or argue… Even though we all know that …

Well, as I say, if I were the king of the forest… I’d write something like this:

Imagine my shock on taking the presidency of Harvard to discover that while our endowment has so many billions of dollars in it we can afford to charge zero tuition to students until the sun collapses into a white dwarf, we still charge almost everyone hundreds of thousands of dollars for a Harvard education. Since I left the school’s presidency, I’ve watched in horror as its endowment has grown to close to forty billion dollars. FORTY FUCKING BILLION DOLLARS! The moral discomfort I felt then must be as nothing to what Harvard’s current president feels as she surveys the state of the world and wonders why she and her small university have simply planted their asses on all that money.

… communications can’t even figure out that you don’t communicate like this.

… for its typically disgraceful behavior in regard to the depravity of some of its rabbis. Marci Hamilton excoriates Yeshiva for issuing only the thinnest of reports about its decades-long sex scandal and cover-up. She rightly compares Yeshiva with the Catholic church and its shameful efforts to deny the depravity of some its priests.

YU reportedly spent millions paying [a law firm] to produce a “Report” that anyone with knowledge of child-protection policies could have written after receiving YU’s policies and reading [newspaper accounts of the abuse]. … I would not have permitted my name to be on such a deficient and embarrassing document. A document that was truly a “Report” would have included an actual report of the facts that prompted the need to review those policies.

As with Yeshiva trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, the point all along has been to ignore, delay, and then – to the extent possible – deny.

Hamilton’s response would be a significant blow to most universities. But this is Yeshiva, and she is a woman. That means she does not exist.

But so par for the course at America’s greatest pretender to academic seriousness.

… has been strutting his stuff at Michigan State, saying stupid shit and getting in trouble for it. What Ward, a professor at the University of Colorado, said was far worse (little Eichmanns, etc.), but William Penn’s arrogant rant is just as powerful an insult to his university. To any university.

And, you know, just after everything that has made and continues to make West Virginia University a national laughingstock, it only makes sense for students at an equally risible school like Texas State University to urge university leaders to make WVU their model and liquor up the games.

One may argue the [Texas State] football team has not given fans something to cheer about in recent years, but part of the problem may be that a major aspect of sporting events has been absent at Bobcat Stadium — alcohol… If alcohol was sold at Bobcat Stadium, the university would surely see an increase in attendance and revenue. According to the West Virginia Gazette, West Virginia University first sold alcohol at its football games during the 2011-2012 season. The school made $520,000 from alcohol sales alone, and a total of $1.26 million in concession sales that year. Considering those figures, imagine selling alcohol at Texas State football games to a fan base and culture that embraces drinking.

A culture that embraces drinking. Such a dainty way to put it.

… might do as a name for the ever-in-the-process-of-being-robbed-blind University of Louisville. Medicare fraud is one thing; Louisville does that too, but so does everyone else. Louisville’s claim to fame is an incredible amount of employee theft. UD detailed a little of it in this post, and now there’s more.

The Internal Revenue Service says the executive director of a medical department at the University of Louisville wrote checks to himself possibly in excess of $2 million since 2007.

Perry “Chad” Vaughn, who oversees the school’s Department of Family & Geriatric Medicine, is due in federal court on Monday after federal prosecutors obtained a preliminary injunction to prevent him from spending any of the funds. The IRS says the money came from the department and affiliated medical practices.

You know, when you get on the Washington DC metro, a nice lady announces that if you don’t want to get your electronics stolen, you shouldn’t sit near an exit door using them openly, etc., etc. Maybe the University of Louisville (which also has its hands full with athletic scandals) should try a similar system of public announcements.

Students there aren’t letting Trustee Steve settle into a non-story as the school year begins. They’re perfectly aware that Hedgie Houdini’s continued trusteeship of their university is a scandal, a disgrace, a major blot on the school. Throw in Bruonians Richard Lee and Steven Rattner and Brown begins to look like Wharton, which, as you know, this blog has long called Forcing Ground of the Great Insiders. (Wharton also proudly claims future United States of America and current Trump University President Donald Trump. )

I mean, when your university’s last president, “a member of Goldman Sachs’s compensation committee…approved a $67.9 million bonus, still a Wall Street record, for Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein,” you should probably watch yourself. With this latest business, the Steven Cohen business, Brown’s building a really scummy critical mass for itself. Only its students, apparently, are willing to bring any moral seriousness to the problem.

And he ain’t even gotten to sports yet!

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Thomas Frank’s hit piece on the American university is swell (I’m still reading it), but Scathing Online Schoolmarm would caution against sentences like this one:

When the board forced the president to resign last June, they cloaked the putsch in a stinky fog of management bullshit.

Mixed metaphors are bad enough (cloaking your putsch in a fog?) but when you bring in bullshit… When you make the fog’s composition the shit of a bull… No.

Note that the sentence in my headline also mixes metaphors.

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Pointless money-drains like a vast administration, a preening president, and a quasi-professional football team should all be plugged up.

Finally he gets to football.

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Ours is the generation that stood by gawking while a handful of parasites and billionaires smashed [the American university] for their own benefit.

The problem with Frank’s cri de coeur resides in sentences like this one. Too much cri, too much coeur. Not enough compelling, rational analysis. Phrases like a handful of parasites and billionaires are a major target of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell rightly notes that in our time “political writing is bad writing.” And bad writing fails to persuade.

[I]t’s scary to think it only takes one brain-dead knucklehead to target Manziel’s helmet-encased brain.

At the Thanksgiving game, the group deep-fries eight turkeys and installs an alcohol ice luge…

I call it

AMERICA: FUCK YEAH!

You say this is too much strength conditioning!

I say

Welcome to Iowa!

You say This bartender’s too young!

I say

Welcome to Iowa!

You say Blowing a .248 is just too much!

I say

Try .341, sucker! (If she’d been doing herself anally, University of Tennessee style, she’d have had a .448!) And welcome to Iowa! America’s Number Two party school last year, and this year — America’s Number One!

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[UD thanks Stephen for the link.]

Ah, but this is America, where classes are routinely cancelled for football games, but if you so much as leave a game early you may eventually be subject to punishment.