America’s dumbest state dumps the dome on its flagship university’s sooooooooper dooooooper fuuuuuuuuture stadium, and UD is disappointed. Où sont les $900 million 55,000 seats d’antan?

The University of Nevada Las Vegas is talking about shrinking the mofo too! This place was going to be huge, and its Adzillatron was going to extend the entire length of the stadium!

Remember this picture?

Well, forget it. Everything’s going to be smaller. Plus, to get a more accurate sense of the place, take all the people out of the shot.

At UNLV’s state of the athletic department address and free lunch held last week at Buca di Beppo near campus, the Rebels’ new sports marketing guy said football season-ticket sales were at 84 percent of last year’s total. Which at first sounded promising. Until somebody said UNLV sold only 3,890 season tickets last year... [W]hen it comes to revenue streams, which is what the UNLV football team must generate to become self-sufficient, just how much is 84 percent of 3,890 season tickets sold anyway?

*********************

Meanwhile, there’s another tragedy in the making at Colorado State University. Their stadium was going to cost a pittance compared to UNLV’s – only $226.5 million – and they were real sure they could drum up a lot of that via all those football fans out there in Fort Collins, so…

Two years after CSU announced efforts to raise private money to build the stadium, fundraising totals do not look promising. Officials acknowledged in July that the university has raised just $24.2 million as of June 30 for the stadium, less than a quarter of the amount that CSU President Tony Frank has sought to raise by this October.

Wha’ happened?

… is the focus of this address by the chancellor to that university’s community; his larger subject is a culture of sexual harassment and assault on campus. The significant history at CU Boulder has to do with the football team ten years ago, but these new allegations are broader than that, and seem to touch on all aspects of the campus.

So far the philosophy department has gotten a lot of attention.

The university has begun dismissal proceedings against one of the department’s tenured professors. He’s accused of retaliating against a female student who filed a sexual assault report with the university against a male philosophy grad student. The professor was the grad student’s mentor, and he decided to launch his own investigation of the incident.

[Professor David] Barnett, who is not the alleged sexual assailant, is accused of compiling a 38-page report painting the victim as “sexually promiscuous” and alleging she falsified the report of the assault, according to a notice of intent to sue CU filed by the victim last month.

The university has settled with the victim.

Plagiarism really isn’t a small thing. Lots of people think it is, because they plagiarize, and they figure it doesn’t matter much and that even if they get caught it’s a small thing.

But it’s a large thing, especially when it’s extensive, and it can bring you down. People judge it harshly because it suggests laziness, incompetence, and an incomplete sense of what belongs to you and what belongs to other people. John Walsh now realizes this.

*****************
UD thanks Jeremy.

To tell you the truth, UD‘s gotten pretty tired of Evan Dobelle, the man out to prove that even if you’ve got a long public record of misuse and maybe outright theft of funds, there’s always another sucker university out there to crown you president.

Evan Dobelle is the “Catherine” of the twenty-first century American university… Catherine being one of the many aliases of Theresa Russell’s Black Widow (“She mates and she kills.”). Catherine kept blatantly marrying rich men and almost instantly after that killing them, but no one ever seemed to notice, and new men just kept on marrying her. Cuz she was pretty and all.

In the case of serial president Dobelle, there wasn’t any Debra Winger around to scream at all the stupid male FBI agents that there’s a pattern here!… One after another school fell for his sweet talk and failed to do the sort of background check that might have uncovered his penchant for disemboweling universities…

So now the Massachusetts Attorney General is going to try to get some of the state’s money back from Dobelle-Trobelle Dobelle…

The AG’s lawsuit against Dobelle seeks damages, civil penalties, costs and attorney’s fees associated with the AG’s ongoing investigation, and the costs of the OIG’s investigation. The AG’s Office will continue to review the OIG’s recent detailed report. Today’s lawsuit does not foreclose the potential for additional action.

UD is tired of Dobelle because he seems to UD what she would call a mild psychopath and is therefore boring. UD and Mr UD have a longstanding endless argument about this. Mr UD says psychopaths are fascinating and UD says only movie psychopaths are interesting because the scriptwriter typically gives them bold slashing ambition and eloquent self-awareness (Catherine, Hannibal the Cannibal, Dr. Robert Elliott), whereas in real life most of them turn out to be – at one end – inarticulately compulsive anti-social nasty petty gameplayers (this seems to UD Dobelle’s type), and at the other end raving dangerous lunatics. Why, UD always asks when they enter this well-worn terrain, should UD waste a moment of time with either type? Except to learn about how to protect herself from them?

Anyway. UD wishes the AG well in her effort to recover some money from the guy. The problem is, he’ll keep playing legal games (he’s counter-suing his most recent ATM) until it’s not worth the state’s while.

*****************

UD thanks James.

… has broken 7,000.

A reminder: An updated and expanded version of one of her MOOC lectures will form the basis of her remarks at the DC Public Library, Georgetown branch, on Charles Wright, who’s the current poet laureate. Date, time: Saturday, September 13, at 1:00. Open to the public.

And here’s a description of the upcoming talk:

America’s newest poet laureate, Charles Wright, has said this about his new job: “”I will not be an activist laureate… I’ll probably stay here at home and think about things.” Unlike most of his predecessors, Wright has no particular social or political agenda. His poetry is contemplative; he seems to write most of it while gazing, at night, toward the hills around Charlottesville, Virginia (he’s a professor at the University of Virginia). And what he writes – in long broad American lines, like Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg – expresses the strange metaphysical place in which a lot of contemporary people find themselves, drawn toward belief in God and the meaning and consolation such belief offers a life; yet profoundly skeptical, profoundly bound by earthly life.

I’ll offer, along with general thoughts about Charles Wright and his place in American poetry and culture, a close reading of one of his most famous poems, Black Zodiac, among whose lines I find this one most illuminating, suggestive, and beautiful:

We go to our graves with secondary affections,
Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled,
star charts demagnetized.

30,000? In these fans-disappearing-from-university-stadiums days, there’s a lot of numbers massaging going on… Let’s check another source on how many San Diego State people show up to watch their football team play.

… SDSU’s official attendance isn’t what TV audiences see… SDSU counts total tickets issued instead of turnstiles turned. … 61,619 fewer fans attended in 2013, or an average of only 22,954 per game.

So SDSU desperately pours more and more public money into its football program in an effort to … what? It’s already a perfectly respectable team with an okay record of wins.

San Diego State football kicks this month, poised to push its bowl streak to five. USA Today ranks SDSU at No. 58, Lindy’s Sports picks the Aztecs as West Division champs in the Mountain West, and sophomore running back Donnel Pumphrey is a player to watch for the nation’s top running back award.

One popular idea is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a small on-campus stadium. Small enough so that 15,000 or so in attendance doesn’t make it look empty.

Yeah. Attendance at football games is tanking at almost all universities. Only FAMU suffers the additional audience-alienation effect that comes from having a marching band that collectively beats its musicians – sometimes to death. This seems to be a real fan turn-off.

But this article makes clear why within five years (UD predicts), at least ten American universities will have coaches as presidents.

An Illinois AAUP committee has protested the firing of (or revocation of an offer to – it’s not yet clear) Steven Salaita. He had been offered a position by the American Indian Studies program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Salaita has in the last few weeks issued a bunch of angry, ugly, anti-Zionist tweets, in response to the situation in Gaza.

The sources familiar with the university’s decision say that concern grew over the tone of his comments on Twitter about Israel’s policies in Gaza. While many academics at Illinois and elsewhere are deeply critical of Israel, Salaita’s tweets have struck some as crossing a line into uncivil behavior.

For instance, there is this tweet: “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised? #Gaza.” Or this one: “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror.” Or this one: “Zionists, take responsibility: if your dream of an ethnocratic Israel is worth the murder of children, just fucking own it already.”

Grotesque, yes, but you don’t fire someone because of what he writes. Free speech and all. An American university decided to hire this guy; professors enjoy academic freedom. Remember Ward Churchill? He wrote of the people killed in the Twin Towers:

[T]hey were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” – a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

A professor at the University of Colorado, Churchill provoked national outrage, plus an effort on the part of that school’s administration to toss him out. But they couldn’t because of his free speech rights. They eventually figured out a way to dump him on the basis of his shoddy research.

If UI truly wants this guy out, it will have to try to cobble something like that together. Otherwise, it gets a reputation as a school unable to uphold academic freedom, and that risks making it unpopular to all sorts of job candidates.

***********************
UD thanks Wendy.

************************

UPDATE: According to this comment of Cary Nelson’s at Inside Higher Ed, “the [University of Illinois] faculty senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure will be reviewing the Salaita matter.”

Yes, yes, you’re right – as UD readers constantly point out, one day it’s the University of Georgia, another day Penn State, another day Southern Methodist, and yet another day Alabama State… So many of this country’s universities are in various high-profile aspects disgusting that no one university wears the crown for long.

But. But – If UD were asked which university, not only in its sports but in its academic component most consistently struck her as disgusting, I think she’d have to say, on balance, and on reflection, and on reading today’s story about Miami’s deeply loved and curiously successful baseball coach Lazaro Collazo (You can still find Miami heavily breathing upon its beloved here. Why take down the page? Taking down pages of disgraced UM people would threaten the sports budget.), that it’s Charles Nemeroff’s and Nevin Shapiro’s University of Miami.

“When you’re talking about PEDs in the black market, we’re talking about some clown in his basement, with a bucket and a burner, and a very dangerously limited knowledge of chemistry… And these chemicals were going in our children’s bodies.”

Yes, the University of Miami’s finest was for years allegedly peddling and administering performance enhancing drugs to the kiddies. Drugs made, as the DEA agent I just quoted notes, according to the highest standards.

See, that’s why UM gets scuzziest. It’s not just about money. It’s about hiring and sanctifying people like Collazo.

******************

Ugh. You want the underbelly? You really want the underbelly? Okay. You asked for it. Welcome to the University of Miami.

*****************

Update: Ooh. They took down the page!

Tom Izzo, the $3.4 million a year Michigan State basketball coach, is hurt and angry and confused. Why don’t MSU professors work with him on his players’ academic performance?

— After being in constant contact with professors in his early years at Michigan State as an assistant, Izzo said he now can’t initiate conversations with professors about his players’ academic performance.

“If I see them on the street or at the grocery store, otherwise I’m afraid to,” Izzo said. “That sounds a little ridiculous and a little venom to it, but I’m telling you the truth. I do not like the way we’ve done it, personally.”

The reason for the separation between coaches and professors is that administrators fear coaches will apply pressure to make their players eligible. Izzo said that fear is unfounded.

“I just can’t see myself doing it, strong-arming a prof, number one, or a prof taking my strong-arm number two. I just don’t understand that,” Izzo said.

One of the reasons Izzo is confused is that there’s really no difference between him and any other MSU professor:

“I am an educator, my degree’s in education,” Izzo said. “And so that bothers me that we do not get the opportunity, because I’m a professor in my own right too, I’m a teacher in my own right too.”

Why then when an MSU professor sees Izzo does she skadizzo? Why won’t she, like the Air Force Academy professors we’ve been reading about lately, “hook up” with him?

[T]he Department of Management, which teaches management courses, would “hook-up” athletes – slang for giving athletes advantages in class.

Why won’t professors at MSU play ball?

Well, Tom, let’s consider.

I know it’s petty of her, but Professor I Don’t Brake for Izzo has trouble seeing you as another faculty member. It’s not about snobbery, Tom; it’s about the disparity between your salaries. Talk about income inequality! She can’t help wondering, while you’re bending her ear at the Kroger, why one of the teachers at her school earns fifteen trillion or so more than she does… Than anyone she knows or ever has known or ever will know does… It makes her nervous around him. He must be very important.

And that’s Point Two, Tom. To you, it’s a simple neighborly chat at the grocery; to her, it’s a command performance with the actual president of the university. The actual governor of the state! She knows your salary mops the floor with the titular president’s salary, and with the governor’s salary. She knows that’s because few people on campus – and certainly in the state – give a shit about anything but sports. It’s all there in the numbers. Why should she risk everything in talking to someone of your stature and power? She’d feel compelled to do anything you asked her with a student – pretty much anything at all – because of your state-wide, not just university-wide, influence. (Do you have the highest public salary in the state? She’s sure you’re way up there…)

Okay, and here’s another reason you’re unpopular with faculty, Tom. Every morning professors at your school get up and read about really sickening and endless and humiliating athletics scandals at Penn State and Chapel Hill and the Air Force Academy and all. It’s not so much that your faculty is immediately afraid of the same thing happening at MSU; rather there’s a basic continuous disgust that’s been generated by all of the stories. You are closely associated with the world (university and professional) generating the disgust, and I’m sorry but that makes you kind of gross to be around. It’s not your fault! UD understands. But it’s your world. UD recommends you send a scout out before you enter public spaces – someone to issue trigger warnings so that people liable to experience the disgust/evasion response can exit the area.

Sometimes retraction watch becomes suicide watch: The toxic combination of a sense of disgrace, and a culture in which suicide is seen by some as a form of atonement, has brought a distinguished Japanese scientist to self-destruction.

Yoshiki Sasai killed himself at his laboratory, where he oversaw – and appeared as co-author on – the now-notorious, apparently totally bogus stem cell work (“the researchers reported that they successfully transformed ordinary mouse cells into versatile stem cells by exposing them to a mildly acidic environment”) of Haruko Obokata. Accused of bearing significant responsibility for Obokata’s misconduct, which brought negative international attention to Japanese science, Sasai apparently fell into a depression.

… would I guess be the word for what we seem to be dealing with in American culture for the last few years. As in — everybody seems to be plagiarizing to some extent… Including, it appears, Mary Willingham, the University of North Carolina tutor who blew the whistle on that school’s fake courses for athletes. Her online UNC Greensboro master’s thesis seems to include quite a number of lifted sentences…

This is too bad, since Willingham has been one of the strongest, most trustworthy voices protesting the corruption of entire academic departments by sports.

****************

UPDATE: The best commentary so far:

Whatever Willingham’s graduate work does to her own reputation is no doubt gratifying to UNC fans of a certain type, but the questions about Tar Heel integrity?

… [R]uining Willingham, fun though it may be, is just another side show beside the smoldering wreck of UNC athletics. It’s a small, mean victory, like cutting boots and rings off of the dead at El Alamein.

The battle has moved on. Bigger things are afoot.

It’s mainly about dead and mangled stuff lately. A sick rabbit hunched under the daylilies while I gardened last week; its flattened remains now add a touch of gray (with skeleton) to the area it must have staggered to in front of the rhododendrons. While Les UDs dined outside last night (July/August has been shockingly low-humidity), three crazed deer came bombing out of the woods. They’d been fighting or playing or running hard. One had a loose antler hanging over its face.

Dead, mangled, and endangered: Caroline, UD‘s master-gardener neighbor, pointed out to UD that butterflies have been pretty scarce this season. UD is so thrilled by the hummingbird sightings that she hasn’t really registered the relative absence of butterflies; but yes, now that she thinks about it, there have been fewer this year. The Washington Post explains the natural and human-made reasons for the drop in number.

Les UDs usually go to their upstate New York house in August, but they seem to have decided to stay in Garrett Park, so while preparing to teach in a couple of weeks, UD can also do a lot of garden and yard work. She loves garden and yard work. She looks forward to raking leaves.

By the way: Faithful readers know UD is a serious tea drinker. She usually goes in for black fruit teas (Mariage Freres’ Marco Polo is an old favorite), but is lately giving green a try (healthier, blahblah). Predictably, they’re very weak to her dissolute palate. Plus someone who visited her at some point not long ago gave her a canister of Pu-erh tea, and she’s been sipping some of that while writing this post. It’s certainly stronger than the greens she’s been sampling… It’s black Pu-erh, after all… But there’s the same struggle with that grassy organic taste…

Well all UD can say is that if your outfit’s always throwing around words like honor – and hey phrases like sacred honor – you deserve everything you get when you recruit shits to win football games.

UD has often said on this blog that she has no serious problem with honestly scummy schools like Clemson and Auburn which like monks who throughout their day repeat All for Jesus are forthcoming about being All For Sports. She’ll cover them on this blog because they’re good for a laugh, but she won’t give them a hard time. They’re not like Chapel Hill or Penn State. They don’t insist that they are real universities. They’re good ol’ boys. They’re trying to be bad. Their drunken tailgates are charming.

Nor do they, like the Air Force Academy – for which, in pretty much its entirety, you and I pay – natter on about their crispy ironed integrity and insist that we view their rows of bright behatted faces with unmitigated admiration. UD dislikes hypocrisy, and recent reports (UD thanks John, a reader, for alerting her to the story) confirm that the Air Force Academy has been very naughty along those lines.

Let’s start with academic honor, academic integrity, sacred academic honor and integrity, shall we?

[A]thletes cheated on tests, and in one instance, an economics professor created a special course for two basketball players – and taught it around their game and practice schedules.

Athletes cheating en masse is nothing – totally routine – but look at that thing about the special course. Julius Nyang’oro fans are going to want to keep an eye on that as details emerge. Read the article in the Gazette for damning enough details; but wait, because there will be more.

And yeah the rapes and the drugs, the whole shebang, at our most sacred honorable tax funded university…

The new superintendent “pulled coaches aside for a recent meeting and told them continued ethical lapses would send the school down the path to ‘Penn State,'” but she’s just a girl. Her All for Football jock predecessor, Mike Gould

ran the academy for three years before passing command to [Michelle] Johnson in 2013. The former academy football star required his staff to provide weekly updates on efforts to instill what he called “fanatical institutional pride” in cadets.

He ended most emails with “Go Falcons!” Johnson ends her emails with “Respectfully.”

See what I mean? Just a girl. No Falcon fanaticism at all. She needs to watch this.

Gould had everybody on campus cheering for the sports teams, including professors.

Former academy economics professor David Mullin remembered one meeting of the academic staff. “They had half the auditorium shout ‘Knowledge!'” he said. “The other half of the room shouted ‘Power!'”

********************

The new girl superintendent needs to watch this: POWER.

********************

UD figures that, professorial self-respect-wise, right behind mandated spot checks of Chapel Hill faculty to make sure they’re meeting their classes (a gift from fake-classes Nyang’oro that keeps on giving) would be academic meetings in which university-provided cheerleaders make you shout out KNOWLEDGE and POWER.