… fourth dumbest state.
Twenty-eight percent [of Louisiana Republicans] said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible.
A university football team four of whose members are alleged to have raped an unconscious student, videotaped the rape, and sent the videotape to friends. They will go on trial soon, as will yet other players, named as accessories.
What to do?
The coach has already announced – before the trial, before we all get to see the film and read the text messages, before everything – that his non-raping players have “dealt with this, and we’re trying to heal and move forward.”
It’s all over, see, and now it’s just about the wounded – his players – somehow finding healing and turning the page. So that’s what to do.
But there are already indications that the poor lads are trying to heal approach might not work.
Take this open letter to Vanderbilt University, written by a recent graduate who, post-rape allegations, is having “a hard time feeling good about my allegiance” to the university.
If a Vanderbilt football player dropped out after his freshman year to go free Tibet, I’d be proud. When they’re kicked out for revolting crimes, I’m ashamed. It’s that simple.
This alumnus
proposed to the administration of the Women’s Center that they partner with athletics for some sort of… anything. Fundraising. Volunteer drive. A patch on players’ uniforms. Whatever, as long as it shows real public support for survivors of sex crimes, or works to prevent future incidents. The point was to give fans who are depressed by recent news something to be proud of, morally. The point was to show that Vanderbilt football stands with survivors of sexual violence.
Response from the Vanderbilt administration? Fuck off.
This annoyed the letter writer. That’s why he wrote the letter.
In making the decision to hold its breath until this thing blows over, the administration decides to be among those (many) institutions that contribute to a culture of quiet enablement.
Vanderbilt begins to look like Yeshiva University.
Excerpts from an obituary in The Telegraph:
… On the afternoon of November 3 1944, as [his unit] assaulted a series of batteries set in the dunes which ring [an island near the port of Antwerp], the leading troop came under sustained heavy fire that killed 15 marines and wounded 21 . With mortar shells bursting all around him, Forfar attended to the wounded. The troop commander, Major JTE Vincent, was not found until Forfar went on another 50 yards under a rain of mortar bombs. It was the first time that Forfar had come under mortar fire, and each time he saw a shell coming he threw himself flat on the sand behind the wooden groynes before rushing forward once more.
He found Vincent lying grievously wounded, and as he was treating him, five Germans appeared over a sand dune and opened fire with a machine gun, killing one of the stretcher party who had crawled forward to join Forfar and wounding another. Forfar coolly continued to treat his patient, who had been shot through the eye and pleaded with Forfar: “Don’t leave me here, sir.” Forfar, who was a small and wiry man, picked the casualty up, put him over his shoulder and carried him to safety.
… It was largely thanks to Forfar’s tireless lobbying — in the teeth of considerable opposition — that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health was established in 1998.
Forfar’s commitment to medical education was expressed in the long-running course in Saudi Arabia which was run by him and his some of his colleagues in Scotland. Theirs was the only course in that country which taught male and female students together, and one of Forfar’s first tasks was to dismantle the barrier in the lecture theatre which the security police had set up to separate the genders.
In 1973 Forfar was the driving force behind the production of Forfar and Arneil, a 2,000-page textbook of paediatrics which is used throughout Britain, and recently went into a seventh edition.
… In June 2009 the mayor of Port-en-Bessin-Huppain unveiled a memorial plaque on the Allée Professeur John Forfar, a walk which links the two villages…
Tressel will be the first of many. Given current circumstances, nothing is more logical than handing the presidency of many of our universities to football coaches.
In one of the many bracing annual rituals surrounding university football – a newspaper article recounting the most recent and most heinous player arrests around the country – Nick Saban offers this intriguing analogy: The big-time university football coach is like a professor who can do everything right but still experience cheaters in her classroom.
Let’s examine the analogy.
In the same article, reporters ask rape-ridden Vanderbilt’s coach if he is “recruiting more players of questionable character in an effort to win.” The guy draws himself up and puffs out his chest and gets way huffy about the question… They all do this when the question gets posed… All of the coaches who recruit criminals to win games employ the patented area woman offended for fourth time in one day method in response to this oft-posed question. Gentlemen, how dare you! The gall!
It’s the same thing for UD, a professor. UD searches high schools all over America in pursuit of evil geniuses, Leopolds and Loebs and Kaczynskis and infant hedge fund managers … all the most brilliant and original sociopaths, so that her school can win the annual Shanghai List Championship. Has she, in her zeal, recruited a few bad apples? No, because you can never know how a person is going to be in advance… And everyone deserves a chance… And you talked to their mothers and their mothers insisted they’d behave… How dare you insist that UD‘s desire to win a contest overrode any sense of morality?
… where the former chief of transplant surgery is on trial for attempted manslaughter.
He also faces three charges of causing bodily injury resulting in death for transplanting livers to unsuitable patients, who subsequently died.
This guy – absurdly not named because of German laws, but so precisely identified in all the articles that everyone must know who he is – has apparently killed quite extensively, in a variety of directions: If the allegations are true, he has killed inappropriate recipients who (one assumes) bribed him to push them up the waiting list; he has also killed non-bribers patiently and legitimately waiting their turn for a liver.
Because this is part of a wider scandal involving medical abuse of the transplant system in Germany, Germans are now refusing – in droves – to donate their organs. As I say, sickening.
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Update: All the yummy details.
… back in the ‘forties. It put you right in the heart of historical events. UD wants to put you – rhetorically – in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, site of the Nick Saban Football Academy, where the reaction to the university giving a big scholarship to a student who just before his sophomore year drives drunk all over Tuscaloosa is not to worry about the well-being of your town but immediately to go to whether his absence from the team (assuming Saban suspends him even for one game) will doom your championship prospects. Headline in local paper:
NOW YOU CAN PANIC: GENO SMITH ARRESTED FOR DUI
Smith is certain to miss playing time early in the season. His absence may not be particularly noticeable in the Virginia Tech season opener, despite the fact that Smith is an excellent tackler and excels in run support. However, that September 14 game against the manically-airborne Aggies in Kyle Field will get a whole lot tougher if Smith misses any appreciable playing time.
No, not even a decent interval during which we ask ourselves whether a scholarship to someone who almost certainly won’t graduate and who drives drunk is altogether seemly…
Tuscaloosa, Alabama. You Are There.
Yes, becoming a vegetable is a reasonable price to pay for your family’s well-being; I’m sure we all agree with that.
Since our professional and university football players take the field knowing they could be concussed into oblivion, it seems perfectly reasonable to send them out there. I’m sure all the juries will agree.
John Hollander, a clever poet who has died, at the age of 83, said this clever thing in a 1985 Paris Review interview.
I was just now watching, on YouTube, a very dull adaptation of To The Lighthouse. Mr UD called me, on his way back from evening mass at Georgetown University, and said Go outside and look at the moon. I’m becoming a moon worshipper.
As I walked out of the house, I saw, in the evening light, a blue jay feather on the doorstep. It looks exactly like this.
I continued out to the middle of Rokeby
Avenue to see the moon.
It looks exactly like this:
On a cool summer night with crickets.
“There’s been a lot of turnover [of staff] in the Dean of the College and other offices . . . and fraternities have been left somewhat to their own devices,” [one Dartmouth observer] said. “It’s become a bit of a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation.”
What’s next for Evan Dobelle? He has spent his way through the University of Hawaii, and through obscure and now much-impoverished Westfield State. Like Patricia Slade at Texas Southern University and Peter Diamandopoulos at Adelphi University, Dobelle arrives at obscure schools with his chest thrust out and starts talking about his important connections and how unless your school gives the president wads of cash for luxury goods no one will respect you.
Dobelle spent more on [a] 2008 Asia trip alone than the $92,000 that Governor Deval Patrick spent to take two dozen officials on a trade mission to Britain and Israel in 2011. But Dobelle said the only unusually expensive item was the luxury hotel bill in Bangkok, and there was a reason for it: The consultant who helped plan the trip said that Thai officials wouldn’t take Westfield State seriously if they didn’t put on a good show.
“She would say, ‘Who the f— will come and listen to Westfield State when they only have time for Cornell? You better set yourself up in a way to show a certain degree of prominence and respect to them,” recalled Dobelle. “So fine, that’s what we did.”
Verbatim out of the Slade/Diamandopoulos book of you gotta spend money on me to make money. They all peddled this line, as did way-high-living American University president Benjamin Ladner.
Todd Wallack, Lesley Cohen Berlowitz’s nemesis at the Boston Globe, contributed to its detailed account of Dobelle’s doings. Wallack seems to be making a specialty of swinish academic administrators. He’ll always be able to find work. Just in the eastern seaboard area.