UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS VOW TO STOP
IMPROPRIETIES IN COLLEGE SPORTS
Yes my little brothers and sisters in sports, this our summer retreat has now come to an end.
All please raise your right hand and repeat after me.
On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country to obey the Scout Law to help other people at all times to keep myself physically strong mentally awake and morally straight I vow if I see any improprieties and I mean any I vow to stop them pronto amen.
Nice, completely straight-faced account of the University of Northern Virginia.
The school offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees, though it’s not clear how that works since it is unaccredited…
[Just-resigned] Chancellor David V. Lee felt like there was just too much chatter about his profile on the world’s largest bondage and sado-masochism website, collarme.com.
Background here.
Gray said that either Rupp Arena or a new downtown arena had to meet the needs of UK’s basketball program.
When asked how Rupp Arena was not currently meeting the needs of the program, Barnhart said, “In today’s world, we’ve got to make sure the fan amenities are what we think our fans deserve.” Those amenities include “electronics” and updated concession stands, he said.
Well, UK. University of Kentucky. What would this blog do without the University of Kentucky. Gotta spend their money on a brand new – or overhauled – stadium… It’s those needs… meeting the needs of the program…
For amenities (needed so that UK can charge more for tickets), and for mysterious ‘electronics,’ which probably means – yes! – the biggest, baddest Adzillatron money can buy! Our fans need loud, huge advertisements exploding in their faces every moment of every game, and, dammit, we’re going to find the money for it!
There have to be enough university professors and administrators who recognize that a soiled reputation is not worth it.
… If you have any doubts about how and when the athletics department lost its way, watch ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary about Miami football, “It’s All About The U.” The backdrop is Miami’s national championship football teams of 1983, ’87, ’89 and ’91.
The show details how Miami developed a “bad boy” image through the taunting of opponents, player arrests and athletes accepting illegal benefits. The worst part is interviews with former players who come across as proud of their actions and the reputation they left at the school.
… Miami never has had a great fan base. Its average attendance for home football games the past three seasons has been 46,299, 47,551 and 51,509. That represents about 60 percent capacity of Sun Life Stadium…
[T]he athletics department likely operates at a deficit.
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Well, but as is usually the case, not a peep out of the professors. Maybe they’re the 45,000 people who come to the games.
Quelle question!
Are vous insane, Wall Street Journal? Look at my last post! T-a-a-ax Ex-emp-tion! And why tax exemption? Because athletics at U Miami are an intrinsic, inherent, ineluctable, innate, inspirational, and – fuck it – intellectual part — part and parcel! – of that institution! Students can’t think straight without a football team! Plus these grand spectacles of sportsmanship and amateurism deepen our students’ moral sense. It’s all about integrity – on the field and off.
There’s a chance that losing football could, in fact, have a positive effect the school’s academic reputation — not to mention donations to support academics. Jonathan Willner, an economics professor at Oklahoma City University, said that in recent years, athletic donations have been eating into some schools’ academic endowments: Some donors who would have given money to a university’s general fund have started giving gifts directly to athletic departments instead. So while the end of football would “certainly see gifts to athletic department drop precipitously, it could increase gifts to university’s other activities,” he said.
While [Southern Methodist University’s] football team returned to the field two years after its suspension, it hasn’t returned to its previous heights. The school has made other strides, though: it said its average SAT scores for incoming students are up compared to 10 years ago. The school said its endowment has grown to $1.07 billion, more than double the pre-penalty total.
Academic improvements help attract donations and out-of-state tuition. SMU’s recent fundraising campaign almost doubled its original goal by raising $542 million from 1997-2002, the school said, providing 80 endowments for academic programs.
Oh shut up.
[B]ecause of the tax-exempt designation for college athletics, nearly all of the revenue, including that generated by ticket sales, television deals, bowl games and corporate sponsorships flows tax-free.
It looks like a business. It smells like a business. But we won’t call it a business. We won’t because we’re still buying into the fiction that these programs are somehow an integral part of the academics at these schools. So we call it a charity.
… It’s a game – a game that makes a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I just happen to believe it’s not a tax exempt purpose.
Shalala …was the president of Wisconsin when Barry Alvarez was football coach. She wanted to hire him as Miami’s coach at one point.
… Alvarez and his son lost $1 million in [Nevin] Shapiro’s Ponzi scheme. Here’s a couple of questions Shalala will get hit with whenever she surfaces:
1) Did your know your good friend, Alvarez, lost $1 million to Shapiro?
2) Why didn’t you inform [Miami’s new coach] of this issue when he took the job?
We just hired this guy, and now he’s won the IZA Prize in Labor Economics.
… law school graduates!
As long as there’s a Goldman Sachs, all is not lost.
Some will argue that eliminating amateurism for college football means the “bad guys win.” In fact, the opposite is true. Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game. Some will wonder what minor league football is doing on campus in the first place — I have wondered about that myself. Yet, the game has found an important entertainment role connected to academia, and the billion dollar television contracts prove it is a valuable commodity.
Huh?
You’d think a law professor might have a grasp of argumentation.
We should promote professional sports on college campuses because it’s entertaining? Broadcasting all student sexual activity on large screens throughout the campus would also be entertaining. Should we do it?
“Eliminating amateurism will diminish the role of those boosters who have polluted the college game.” Yes, and that is why professional basketball and football in American are so pure and unpolluted. It doesn’t seem to occur to Roger Abrams that there are manifold other sources of pollution.
And …connected to academia? Big time sports as currently played on American campuses not only have no connection at all to academia; they’re actively destructive of it.
I mean, what does Abrams have in mind by academia? Classroom buildings adjacent to stadiums? The appearance on a television screen, during a football game, of the name of a university?
And billion dollar tv contracts prove it’s a valuable commodity? Ask Donna Shalala, or any number of university presidents up to their asses in legal bills and bad publicity, how valuable a commodity it is. It’s precisely the outrageously big money that’s brought in all the scum and made university football and basketball lucrative but deadly to academia.
That is, again, if by academia you mean something other than buildings where administrators collect ticket and luxury suite and television proceeds. If on the other hand you’re okay with the Auburnization of our universities – if money and entertainment seem to you overriding ‘academia’ goals – if you think universities are money and entertainment centers above all (they will certainly become so under this regime, since no other activity on any campus can hope to compete with an immense high-profile billion dollar industry), then go with it. Go with it.
…in Libya. Here’s Al Jazeera live.
… way.
Gerson M. Sternstein, MD – Dr. Sternstein is the co-owner and Medical Director of Paragon Behavioral Health. He received his undergraduate degree, medical school training, and psychiatric residency education at Yale University.
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State regulators have accused Berlin psychiatrist Gerson Sternstein with grossly overprescribing narcotics to drug-addicted patients at his office, a pattern that they say fed the patients’ drug abuse and led in some cases to criminal behavior — the reselling of drugs on the street.
Two patients under Sternstein’s care died of drug overdoses. In wrongful-death lawsuits that are separate from the state action, the families of the two dead patients contend that Sternstein was essentially a drug dealer …
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What were his peers on when they did the ratings?
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Unbelievable levels of drug distribution alleged from one man. As always, given the national pain pill crisis, the question is why it took so long for anyone to do anything about this.
One of the daffier experimental ideas in the Australian mental health community – trying out anti-psychotic drugs on children as young as fifteen who have never had a psychotic episode but might, by some mysterious standard, be at risk for one in the future – has been shot down due to international outrage.
Whether it’s Joseph Biederman here or Patrick McGorry there, note the common thread: dosing young and vulnerable brains and bodies with immensely powerful drugs, based on the thinnest of diagnostic justifications. It’s a sickening, destructive, and frightening trend. Universities need to be aware that they are housing – and often celebrating – the dosers.
People like [University of Miami president Donna] Shalala ... are the system. They have cross-contaminated school standing with NCAA hypocrisy. They are one and the same. Shalala maintains a watchdog role in the NCAA.
… Was this decades-long culture of institutional malfeasance [at the University of Miami] so rooted it ignored [warnings about Nevin Shapiro]? Was the lack of institutional control at the very heart of the institution?
“[A]s one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, … moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night,” writes James Wood, in a New Yorker review of a book about secularism.
Like André Comte-Sponville, who, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, celebrates as ‘atheist spirituality’ the experience of Rilkean moments of self-dissolution which allow one to feel the true being of the world and one’s natural place in it, the contributors to The Joy of Secularism (its cover archly done up to resemble The Joy of Cooking) argue that secularism is “not a negative condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”
One of Joy‘s contributors, Bruce Robbins, extends Comte-Sponville’s ecstatic immanence, his worship of the earth and of humanity’s habitation upon it, beyond the mystically experiential, arguing that religious fullness – of meaning and value – may be derived from social action. Wood writes:
[Robbins] faults Charles Taylor for assuming that modern secular life “is beset with the malaise of meaninglessness.” Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means “the elimination of magic,” but it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic. If a malaise besets contemporary life, Robbins writes, it may have been produced not by the march of progress but by the faltering of progress — “by the present’s failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”
Here, Robbins, like many secularists, aligns himself with Camus’ existential defiance of meaninglessness through the free, creative, ascription of meaning to a Sisyphean world – a meaning which, founded on the human, and on the love of the human, would inevitably have social justice at its core.
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But Wood points out that all the secular – indeed, all the religious – affirmation and comfort in the world can’t really stop us asking our “tormented metaphysical questions.” (Why is life so short? So inexplicable?) As Adam Phillips, a contributor to the Joys volume, says elsewhere:
There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail… [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.
Indeed we prove recalcitrant even to the foundational project of spiritual calming, or at least spiritual clarity; we continue to harbor hatred of, and rage at, our stingy, undisclosing world. Wood quotes a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:
For one moment she felt that if [she and her companion] both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.
Beautiful, joyous, vigorous, wise Mrs. Ramsay must be summoned from the dead to share her wisdom about life, and to tell us why she, so vigorous and good, had to die; yet she stays as silent as the friend Donald Justice addresses in his poem, Invitation to a Ghost:
Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.
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“The main condition of absurdity,” writes Thomas Nagel in a 1971 essay, The Absurd, “is the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.” He anticipates the problem with Comte-Sponville’s atheist spirituality: we simply seem constituted toward transcendence, toward the positing and sensing of so much more than this. We try to allow ourselves to be dragooned (a gloriously absurd word, that) back into the limited enterprise of a human life, but we remain unconvinced; as soon as we get there, a collision occurs “between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.” When we’re truly earthbound, our curious but rather impressive “capacity to see ourselves without presuppositions, as arbitrary, idiosyncratic, highly specific occupants of the world, one of countless possible forms of life” is activated.
Hence our absurd predicament: We may have trouble believing in heaven, but we are, most of us, entirely unable to believe exclusively in earth. For us, things seem always to ramify, things are fraught, things are always spiraling outward with transcendent implication. Caught on an earth which ever catches us up, we’re in a predicament, writes Nagel, both “sobering and comic.”
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If there’s not much disentangling absurdity discursively, there’s its aesthetic treatment (hence Wood’s recourse to Woolf), in which this dilemma is staged in ways that elucidate it and reconcile us to it.
In his preface to a selection of Philip Larkin’s poems, Martin Amis attempts to account for Larkin’s status as the best-loved of post World War II British poets. It’s odd that he’s so loved, given his sour – even ugly – personality, and what Amis rightly calls the “militant anti-romanticism” of the poems.
Seamus Heaney’s misgivings are probably representative: Larkin is “daunted” by both life and death; he is “anti-poetic” in spirit; he “demoralises the affirmative impulse.”
Yet of course Larkin, more powerfully than any other poet of his time, places himself precisely in the thick of absurdity; he is the emblematic sober and comic stick in the mud.
His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them – was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined. Larkin, often, is more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable.
We absorb him like that because he captures our recalcitrance to our projects, and even makes this recalcitrance sing. We recognize ourselves in Larkin’s resigned irony because so often that is exactly where we are. Larkin doesn’t whisper to us beautiful secrets; but he whispers our strange and even somehow beautiful truths.
