They’ve finally gotten what they want at the University of Utah: A football team successful enough to empty their classrooms. Cancelling all classes on this season’s opener, crows one Utah vice president, is “a recognition of the reality that the stadium is now filling for every game.”

Yes, by God, we’ve done it! We’ve finally figured out how to make the Utes so popular that there’s no point in holding classes while they play!

Sure, there are a few pissed professors. And students. But think of the money! The exposure! Now everyone knows how the University of Utah feels about its educational mission!

Another new semester, another lap around the laptops in the classroom issue.

Steve Kelman, of Harvard’s Kennedy School, writes a pretty sensible post about them. He tells us, in a parenthetical whisper, of rumors involving this or that entire school banning them… Universities will increasingly ban them, for all the obvious reasons Kelman cites and more (they keep you from paying attention and learning anything; they distract the students around you; they are seriously rude, etc., etc.); but for now most schools are shilly-shallying. They know how horrible mobile devices are in class, but they’re afraid of pissing off students if they ban them… and, after all, it makes the schools feel like idiots to have spent so much money and rhetoric on the glories of classroom laptops and now to have to admit that they invested their money and their rhetoric unwisely.

But do not fail to note that in Kelman’s second example the pressure is coming from the students themselves. They know more intimately than professors just how these devices are being used, and if they have a smidgeon of intellectual seriousness they want them out of their faces.

Here’s Kelman’s policy, as stated on his syllabi:

In class, use of laptops to take notes is fine. However, use of laptops in class to check e-mail, surf the Web, use Facebook or Twitter, text, etc. [is] unprofessional and disrespectful to everyone in the classroom. All mobile devices must be switched off during class.

(He uses “mobile devices” to cover iPhones.)

The problem with this policy is that almost no one will follow it; so Kelman has condemned himself to life as a policeman.

[W]e medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices. In the early 2000s, for example, drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe. The law now requires “black box” warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments.

Universities should consider whether their medical faculties include people who, either through involvement in corporate ghostwriting, conflict-of-interest shilling for the pharmaceutical industry, or questionable experimental practices, are contributing to this vile trend by lending an impression of research neutrality to it. Don’t let your university be used in this way. As with the Joseph Biederman fallout at Harvard, it will ultimately hurt your school.

That does capture it. And the value is totally monetary. For the rest… well, start with the University of Miami. And work your way down.

The escalating TV dollars are reshaping the amateur realm of college sports. With more money at stake, coaches say, the pressure to win is rising. Head coaches have long earned multimillion-dollar salaries, but now the TV money is cascading into the ranks of assistant coaches. Gus Malzahn, the offensive coordinator at Auburn University, college football’s defending national champion, has received a new deal valued at $1.3 million annually. Schools are also pouring money into stadium renovations and new training facilities.

Yes, UK’s now richly retired last president gassed on endlessly about how UK was on the verge of becoming a top-twenty university. How could it not soar into that empyrean? It spent most of its money on corrupt coaches and apathetic administrators. It embarrassed itself on a regular basis. It spat on the state’s most important living writer, Wendell Berry. Ain’t that how it’s done?

Actually, no. As this commenter – on an article about the newest faculty member on the university’s board of trustees – points out, Todd’s master plan trashed the school’s ranking and offered students an ever more amply paid, notoriously corrupt, sports program, coupled with angry, undercompensated faculty. Not really a recipe for a high US News and World Report outcome, though perhaps UK’s administration believes that the magazine uses sports wins in determining rankings.

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The new trustee, Irina Voro, points out that the school treats faculty like “bumpkins.” Plus she “cited a Russian proverb: ‘A fish starts to be rotten at the top.'” Plus, she said that “a friend who is a former UK auditor couldn’t decipher the UK budget that is furnished to each UK trustee.”

Well, only a bumpkin wouldn’t realize that when you’ve got a sports program like UK’s, a lot of sleights of hand are called for.

Treating the student as a customer, and shifting to what students want in the moment’s popularity, does not serve Kansas. Shifting university resources to the 200 students who today want to be crime-scene investigators, thanks to “CSI” on television, will produce 190 graduates without a job. Closing down a physics department because it only produces a few nuclear physicists, when we desperately need every one and many more, directly damages the future of Kansas and our country…

State universities should not be commercial storefront operations advertising the latest fad curricula. State universities serve a public good.

An Emporia State department chair notes that universities are not supposed to be customer-driven.

There’s a beautiful honesty here. It’s not easy to write this stuff.

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The business of honoring – not a cheater, but an inept man with a vaguely reformist tendency who got taken over by the organization he was supposed to lead – is also rhetorically dicey.

UD wonders why, in this effort on behalf of Brand, his salary as head of the NCAA is not mentioned. Don’t you think a million dollar plus salary should at least be figured in a little bit in trying to explain why Brand capitulated rather rapidly to business as usual at the NCAA?

It’s like this, see.

Meaningful reform will happen in big-time college sports only when everyone involved – coaches, athletic directors, conferences, BCS, networks, advertisers (but not the athletes themselves, because they have no standing in the argument) – agree to take considerably less money than they do now.

Greed’s the big winner. It’s the Great Immovable. And now that the potential money – for coaches, schools, everybody except the players – has increased, as Art Thiel writes, “exponentially,” the cheating is rising accordingly. To police it, the NCAA would have to “increase [its] enforcement division to something on the order of the North Korean army.”

Solution? Go with the greed, baby. Live in the truth.

The likeliest solution, which is already on the drawing board in some form, is for the top 64 schools to break away from the NCAA and form their own professional association of four super-conferences, with limited connections to the universities and the old rulebook.

To take it a step beyond, the conferences should rent facilities from universities for the same amount they now provide to subsidize the non-revenue sports.

Limited connections to universities… There’s an enigmatic, pathetic psychology in a lot of people out there having to do with rooting until you’re bleeding from every pore for what you think of as your school. The people who write about big time university sports have been telling you for awhile that the players, coaches, tv execs, etc., on and around the field have little to nothing to do with your school…

But we can’t pursue that direction of thought in anything approaching a rational way, so shut up, UD… I’m just saying… Just thinking out loud here… That as long as many fans need the fantasy that they’re rooting for their school, Thiel’s purely capitalist solution – an excellent, excellent solution – will have trouble prevailing.

My blog became my voice, my outlet, my “social media” in a way I couldn’t have dreamed of. Into it I poured my regrets, desires, and memories. Some days I became possessed. The comments were a form of feedback I’d never had before, and I gained a better and deeper understanding of my readers. I made “online friends,” a concept I’d scoffed at. Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to. I didn’t intend for it to drift into autobiography, but in blogging there is a tidal drift that pushes you that way. Getting such quick feedback may be one reason; the Internet encourages first- person writing, and I’ve always written that way.

… The blog let loose the flood of memories. Told sometimes that I should write my memoirs, I failed to see how I possibly could. I had memories, I had lived a good life in an interesting time, but I was at a loss to see how I could organize the accumulation of a lifetime. It was the blog that taught me how. It pushed me into first- person confession, it insisted on the personal, it seemed to organize itself in manageable fragments. Some of these words, since rewritten and expanded, first appeared in blog forms. Most are here for the first time. They came pouring forth in a flood of relief.

From the beginning of his forthcoming memoir.

Ethan Rothstein in SB Nation has a nicely written update of the University of Texas / ESPN tv network – a network showcasing UT’s football team for fun, profit, and recruitment. Rothstein seems to think there’s something wrong with the arrangement. This “walking conflict of interest,” he writes, “marches on, trying to only grow bigger and conflict-of-interest-ier.” He worries about what will happen “if Texas has its own Nevin Shapiro hiding in the wings.”

I must say. Nevin may have to rot in jail for awhile, but his j’accuse has given him an extremely impressive cultural currency. A one-act play has already been written.

I’m just reading through this now.

Details in a few moments.

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The story hasn’t hit the English language yet, so the following quotations are my translation from various French sources. Joseph Macé-Scaron, an important member of the French literary community, recently published a novel, a satire about the world of contemporary journalism in Paris, Ticket d’entrée (Ticket). It has just received a high-profile award.

A few days ago, a woman named Evelyne Larousserie happened to read the French novel just after having read the Bryson, and the copying “immediately jumped out at me.”

The author prefers the term intertexuality. Who wouldn’t?

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An attempt at a defense.

If you listen to UM officials, the nation gloats while the U twists in the wind.

“…[I]t pains me tremendously to see such sensational stories and headlines,” former athletic director Paul Dee is quoted in the Miami Herald. “UM is getting creamed again, and everyone around the country loves it.”

But the reason UM is getting creamed again and others gloat is that its football program is in scandal again, as it has been over and over. A fine academic center has developed as its national face not medical giants or scientific powerhouses but a football bad boy on steroids.

The athletic program over the years has been sanctioned three times. That’s ample reason for bad repute…

Under Shalala’s leadership, UM is changing the face not only of American university sports. It’s also contributing to important changes in the way scientific research is conducted in the United States.

It was to Shalala’s UM that Charles Nemeroff repaired after his problems at Emory. As the Chronicle puts it:

… Thomas R. Insel, who was helping to lead the [government’s conflict of interest] review, was also helping a tainted researcher, Charles B. Nemeroff, land a new job at the University of Miami.

Dr. Nemeroff, while chairman of the psychiatry department at Emory University, was one of several high-profile doctors found to have given speeches or written articles in medical journals extolling drugs or products made by companies that had paid them money or stock benefits that they did not report to their universities. Emory agreed to make Dr. Nemeroff ineligible for NIH grant money for two years. But after moving to Miami with the assistance of Dr. Insel, the director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Nemeroff was receiving NIH money before the two-year ban expired.

Addressing the NIH’s advisory board after Dr. Insel’s assistance to Dr. Nemeroff was revealed, Dr. Collins said he would delay the process of putting the rules in place to consider additional changes. In particular, he said the rules may need to be changed to ensure that any penalties or sanctions against a researcher remain in effect if the researcher moves to another institution.

Smart move on Nemeroff’s part, by the way, to jump to the University of Miami. They’ll never give him any trouble. You can’t go any lower than UM.

Mr UD was at the computer, following developments in Libya.

UD was putting on sneakers, getting ready to take a short, post-operative stroll through her azaleas.

Suddenly their house loudly began to shake. LOUDLY. As if it were about to collapse on them.

Les UDs raced out of the house; they heard shouts up and down the street.

I checked my roof for a massive tree that might have fallen on it, but I knew I wouldn’t see that. No tree could make our house do what it just did, vibrate violently in every corner for over a minute.

Earthquake. 6.0 magnitude, epicenter Mineral Virginia.

Very scary. I’ve never been in an earthquake before.

Out on the street, on a beautiful late summer day, I stopped some kids who’d been in the park nearby.

“Yeah! Everything started to move! We saw a window in a house across the street and it was moving!”

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La Kid was alone in an elevator at the Congressional Quarterly offices in downtown Washington.

“It shook from side to side. I thought It must be broken in some way. Then I got to my floor and the door opened and the earthquake was over and I was greeted by a scene of all my co-workers freaking out totally… They evacuated the building and told us we could take the rest of the day off.”

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Photos from the DC quake.

William Black investigated the savings and loan scandals in the ‘eighties. You remember those. They cost American taxpayers around $500 billion and made the Milken brothers – responsible, according to many insider accounts, for much of the fraud – incredibly rich.

Decades later, noting UCLA law school’s recent enthusiastic acceptance of millions of dollars from Lowell Milken as long as UCLA names a school after him, Black reminds us what Bernie Madoff (benefactor and high-ranking Yeshiva University trustee) and so many other criminals and accomplices know: Prestige universities are reputation colonics. They are there to clean your tushy. They are Quackser Fortunes making their fortunes in the Quackser way.

This is why Black goes on to say

“The UCLA thing … is a great demonstration of one of my family sayings: ‘It’s impossible to compete with unintentional parody.'”

Well, at least the ads remain. Whew!