Longtime readers know that University Diaries likes to follow the Italianization (background on this term here) of the American university, its step-by-step degradation to the point of no return… The big-time sports schools are the leading edge here, of course; and within that category alcohol-sodden big-time sports schools are the real winners. U President Vows Push for Stadium Liquor Sales is, when you think about it, a really remarkable headline… the university president as booze pusher… spending his time pushing booze for his students through the legislature… the university president as alcohol salesman… on the august occasion of his retirement, we scroll through the president’s achievements… got the state to allow our students to drink in the stands…

So here’s a recent Dignity Watch item: The chancellor of one university boasts that his university, unlike a neighboring university, doesn’t – yet – generate revenue by fucking up its students.

Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp hasn’t held back lately taking shots at the Longhorns, which for years ruled the state of Texas in college sports.

Sharp had a cutting response to the news two days ago that the Longhorns will begin selling alcohol at football games.

Through a tweet from Gabe Bock of TexAgs radio, Sharp said, “Our athletic program has not reached the point where we require the numbing effects of alcohol.”

And that’s A&M saying that! Texas A&M!

Whether it’s national disgrace University of Oklahoma or national disgrace Florida State, the crucial step in creating a totally shitty university is appointing as president a used-up political hack. Once you’ve given David “We can’t control the marketplace” Boren and John “I want FSU to have a chiropractic school” Thrasher their pointless sinecures, the sky’s the limit. Coaches and boosters and – er – fraternities – are free to run the school right into the ground.

FSU faculty begged the trustees not to appoint Thrasher; one professor called him, with remarkably accurate foresight, the “scary” rather than the “safe” choice. It’s scary to appoint passive stupid people to run things; active, clever, bad people step in and run them instead. It’s scary to attend a school where everyone has to hide from the football team. It’s scary to realize how quickly a campus can become a criminal syndicate.

First it was Jameis Winston. Then it was De’Andre Johnson. And now Dalvin Cook! Poor Coacha Inconsolata (put that phrase in my search engine for background on this poignant human type) Jimbo is in full more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger mode. How could he have known that yet another of his football players was, um, problematic?

Well, how about he could have known because…

Wait. Lemme start that sentence again. Jimbo Fisher (2015 salary: $5 million) did know, because Cook already had a hell of a record for someone of his tender years.

Cook was suspended by FSU on Friday after the state attorney in Tallahassee issued a warrant for the player’s arrest after a 21-year-old woman accused him of punching her in the face several times during an argument outside a bar last month.

… Cook was arrested as a juvenile and charged with robbery in 2009. Prosecutors later opted to drop the case. Cook was also arrested and charged with firing a weapon and possessing a weapon at an event on school property in 2010, according to FDLE records. The third-degree felony charge was later dropped or abandoned.

… Since arriving on campus, Cook has been charged with criminal mischief following an incident in June 2014 when he was one of several players (see Jameis Winston) involved in a BB-gun shooting incident that caused minor property damage.

Bottom line: The political hack running FSU, and the coach running the political hack, do not care if their students are placed in direct danger by the bullies they put on the team. They. Do. Not. Care.

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FSU: Proudly scummy for decades.

If you’re keeping score.

But let’s be fair and look at the larger picture.

This is a question worth pondering. When not only Florida State, but several other university and of course professional football teams generate so much abuse of women, it’s worth asking whether they are in fact in some sense requiring it.

Of course the question as posed is meant to be amusing, provocative, whatever. But let’s take it seriously for a moment.

The article from which I got the question is titled

What is the Deal With FSU and Their Recruitment of Psycho Quarterbacks?

with the plural meant to refer to FSU’s Jameis Winston… So there’s this “psycho” theme (think also, for instance, of Nebraska’s big hero, Richie Incognito) and this abuse of women theme, that runs through the sport, sometimes with video accompaniment, sometimes not.

UD suggests that the arms race in professional university sports (as UD calls it) involves a dramatic escalation not only of coaching salaries and Adzillatrons, but increasing pressure to locate bigger, scarier, and more volatile players.

The appeal of massive crazy easily set-off dudes on the field is obvious – they intimidate opponents, excite fans, etc., etc. But as Incognito’s sad college career attests, it’s increasingly dangerous to put hopped-up essentially professional football player-sized students on a campus with plain old students. This kind of classroom incident will, I think, become more common:

Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.

According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”

Days after the incident, Davis 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.

Yes. Professors protecting students from the team.

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Writing about professional football, one observer notes:

We idolize players of a game that champions aggression and violence. Their lifestyles of opulence and celebrity are dependent on their ability to run fast, throw far and hit very hard. They are so dependent on this lifestyle that they no longer have the ability to control the aggression for which they are revered.

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To make the university situation even more perilous, football players tend, as at Oregon State, to move in packs (the police in Florida are currently interviewing five or six players who entered the bar with De’Andre Johnson). Like the bikers at Twin Peaks, they’re a band of brothers, and they’ll all beat you up.

Keep in mind, finally, that the trend in America is not only toward guns on campus, but, in some places, open carry.

Talk about an arms race on campus.

Feast your mind on the academic future.

“[F]ar more of [their] colleagues are banning laptops than they did five years ago…”

Well that’s great. That’s just great. Those of us who’ve been screaming for the last ten years about the classroom laptop scam are thrilled. But why isn’t anyone expressing any remorse about a decade of students lost to the fad? Why isn’t anyone saying anything about the many lazy cynical professors who continue to promote laptop use in their classrooms?

No laptops. Another cutting edge idea from the Aspen Ideas festival.

Missed a chance to mention the most impressive thing of all: He founded a university.

Some of what its sponsor says tells you just how amazing things are at America’s sports factories.

“If this altercation had occurred between him and another guy I believe the legal system would have taken care of it. He may have been suspended for a while but would have been right back on the team,” she said.

True, true. A routine incident, a total non-event, the sort of thing that happens every weekend at jock schools – a fight between a player and another guy… this would have been nothing. Nothing at all. How many times has UD covered a story in which a big bruiser, a fancy recruit, damn near killed another guy? Big deal. You recruit Richie Incognito you gotta figure stuff like that’s gonna happen. But oh no let ’em hit some woman and boooo fucking hoooo…

…and he won’t be the last. But he is certainly one of the first professors to complain that the “final straw” (one of his cascade of cliches) in the matter of American university big-time sports is the doubling of prices for faculty tickets. Not the crime, not the slime, not the one-and-done time, not the president-as-athletic-department-mime (gimme a break – trying to keep up the … rhyme…) — no, the ugly rot at the core of campus football and basketball turns out to be his university having “more than doubled the price of faculty and staff season … tickets.”

In setting out his critique of university sports at places like his school, the notorious University of Texas, Cherwitz offers the classic bad writer’s combination of pretentiousness and – as we already noted – cliche. Oh – plus pointless quotation marks.

I cannot speak to what may be the legitimate concerns and response of donors. However, I know that most of my faculty and staff colleagues with whom I have talked opted not to renew their season tickets. It now was clear to us that the Athletics Department no longer considers faculty and staff to be members of the “family” and “community” – the very people who educate and serve student athletes. Instead, we became another one of the institution’s many “corporate customers.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm trusts that given his love of sports, Cherwitz’s boycott will be of short duration. She’s sure that will be true of other faculty members as well.

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UD thanks a reader for sending her the opinion piece.

[A recruit to Brigham Young U’s football team who was recently shot] could have been specifically targeted stemming from charges made last February.

That’s when [he] was arrested for allegedly raping a woman at knifepoint after he had arranged for foot-fetish services from her.

Well, you take the comparative approach. Let’s say you’re comparing the University of Oklahoma and Florida State.

In the case of Oklahoma, the video of one of the most prominent students on campus punching the lights out of a woman remains private, and after a suspension the student has been put back on the football team; in the case of FSU, the video of a similarly prominent student punching the lights out of a woman is public, and he has been dismissed from the team.

Those who’ve seen both videos are able to offer a more detailed comparison.

Some are saying the Mixon tape is worse than the DeAndre Johnson tape, but I disagree. I thought the Johnson video was more graphic. The picture is more up-close from Tallahassee, and Mixon’s response appears more instinctual, which cuts him a little slack, for what that’s worth.

So, okay. You can choose a school where the assault was instinctual, versus a school where the assault was premeditated… You can choose a school where students who do this to women are put back on the team, or a school where students who do this to women are kept off the team… Hm… Hm…

An Orlando Sentinel columnist puts the matter in terms of the great currency of any university: knowledge.

[FSU] kicked [De’Andre Johnson] off the team Monday after video was released of him punching a woman in a bar. Somewhere, Ray Rice was having elevator flashbacks and Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon was grateful he plays for a school that still knows how to protect football stars who slug women.

The Sentinel writer even puts it in terms of one of the university’s disciplines: philosophy.

If a female … falls after getting hit by a football player and nobody sees the video, is it really that big of a deal?

Not at Oklahoma.

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If you’re a parent thinking through this decision with your daughter, maybe you should tend toward FSU. The batterer there gave the act a moment or two of thought, which would maybe have given your daughter a little time to defend herself… And actually Mixon is one of two woman batterers brought back onto the Oklahoma team – they obviously like their hard-hitting players, er, seasoned…

On the other hand, if tradition matters to you, you’ll find Oklahoma standing firmly and proudly in the past. One writer looks back on

… the days when athletes battering women was just another one of the dirty little secrets of big-time sports — right along with academic fraud, failed drug tests and severe head trauma.

But at Oklahoma, it’s still like that!

Still — Decisions, decisions…

Jenny Kutner, Salon:

But the video should not be necessary — at least not for us, for the public, to see. We should not need to watch footage of [Florida State University’s De’Andre] Johnson punching a woman in the face in order to entertain the possibility that a quarterback on one of the nation’s premier college football teams might have committed an act of violence. We have seen similar footage too many other times to write this off as implausible, and we have taken too many other opportunities to make excuses and poke holes.

The brutal images that got Johnson suspended indefinitely from the Seminoles and charged with a crime serve a purpose, and they could be key to securing justice. But they’re not the only clue that something is amiss in the sports world, especially and not exclusively. We should know by now that a [university-based] culture of virtually unchecked violence against women exists — and we shouldn’t need to watch a display of it on a loop to confirm our suspicions.

… of the first order.”

[T]he most dangerous form of NASCAR racing remains the most luridly popular with fans even though higher speeds and more spectacular accidents created by them are endangering both spectators and drivers.

“NASCAR got what they wanted…” [one driver said] of restrictor plate racing. “Cars getting airborne …”

Watch its quarterback in action here.

The school’s a class act all around.

Best part: It’s run by a hack who, with his BFF coach, specializes in the “enabling and justifying of behavior other schools at least pretend to care about.”

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FSU’s an experiment in progress: Is there any behavior football fans won’t tolerate? At a university?

And don’t tell UD they’ve dismissed the guy. They only dismissed him when a now-way-viral video of one of FSU’s hottest quarterback recruits battering a woman at a bar was released… And hell. How did that happen? FSU is famous for its control over local law enforcement. What’s going on??

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FSU, pre-game.

It’s 8:30, and boats of all sorts are gathering at the shore across from the Star of the Sea apartments. Fishing boats, yachts, cruisers jammed with sightseers. Long lines of folding chairs have been set up along the beach for the big event.

There’s a breeze, the sky is clear, night’s coming on. So far so good.

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Blue velvet sky, blue velvet sea. The waves press in, the lit-up ships list. Their engines throb as they inch closer. A helicopter circles. On the beach, glow sticks dance.

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Officially dark now, and things should start happening soon. Though it’s already quite a spectacle – the crowds, the bright shining boats, the throbbing engines and the throbbing sea.

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Whew. Ol’ UD‘s emotionally exhausted. The display started quietly, of course, with pleasant little golden streamers here and there. But it quickly began flaring out and up with tutti-frutti bursts all over the sky. Louder and louder rocket reports vibrated the air. The final red white and blue explosions were frenzied and beautiful and we all clapped and hooted.

No – the things that never go away. That lodge in your mind. All my life I’ve thought about the last page of Karla Kuskin’s children’s book, Just Like Everyone Else. My parents must have read it to me… I must have read it…

The final line –

Then Jonathan James flew off to school.

– seems to have echoed down the years for me. Who knows why. Flew off to school.