Good on this country’s football universities for decimating their students’ brains! Plus there’s their commitment to social justice: Consider the lovely racial angle to the current game, detailed here.

… has just performed its first West Virginia University student riot of the year (they riot all the time at Gordon Gee’s WVU). This one featured almost a thousand students hurling beer bottles at city workers trying to plow snow from the street students had chosen for their couch burning. As WVU sociologist Karen Weiss notes in her WVU-inspired book, Party School:

[T]he party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. 

They riot so much at WVU that it’s news when they don’t, as in this headline:

NO RIOTING IN MORGANTOWN AFTER WVU LOSS

This latest riot was quite violent and quite protracted, drawing various police forces and extensive weaponry.

[His just-purchased $240 million apartment is] not a short-term investment, but a home where [Kenneth] Griffin will spend considerable time, said Zia Ahmed, his spokesman. He added that Mr. Griffin has given … a $150 million gift to Harvard.

Yes. Britain finally sends a child-slasher – make that baby-slasher – to jail.

Let’s start with the story at good ol’ Mizzou.

“So many cheaters! What are we to do?

Their tutors will write their assignments,” they said.

Then the NCAA came and chopped off their head.

At Penn State the coaches fuck boys in the shower

The big men on campus make lesser boys cower

Even the frat guys get ready to die

When the athletes at Penn State stop by to say hi.

When your school or museum starts considering whether to return Sackler money, keep this in mind. Not just depraved indifference. Fiercely determined depraved indifference.

(Quoted here.)

Purdue Pharma, opioid epidemic, 2014:

In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges.

I know. They’re not really the same thing. Business practices have evolved since 1982. The Sacklers alone make money at both ends.

[Yale] has lobbied against the [new] 1.4 percent excise tax on annual endowment returns, which targets 35 universities — including Yale — with assets greater than $500,000 per full-time student. According to a budget update published earlier this month, projected spending from the University’s endowment will grow by 6.3 percent next fiscal year, despite adjustment to the new tax.

Don’t worry, Yalies! We’ll labor night and day to keep the government’s stinking hands off that 1.4 percent!

U Buffalo’s generous donor

Gives each of his salesmen a boner.

One dancer exotic

For every narcotic

That you sell for the company’s owner.

Seven hundred million dollars over the last ten years in personal compensation! Not bad. This guy makes the Sacklers look like chumps. And all on the backs of poor slobs in West Virginia who took his drugs and destroyed themselves and their worlds. And now the CEO of the most disgusting opioid distributor in the world (“In 2006 and 2007 … McKesson Corp … shipped more than 5.66 million opioid pills to a single pharmacy in a tiny town in rural West Virginia, according to a scathing congressional report released last month.”) has decided that with the eyes of the courts upon his business methods the time is absolutely right to retire.

Time to explore other ways he can make a contribution to society.

— because they’re never too young!

Corey O’Hern, director of Undergraduate Programs for the Sackler Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, emphasized the importance of the Institute in fostering collaboration between departments at Yale. According to O’Hern, there is a lack of grants supporting such research on the national level. “The funding, independent where it’s from, has been crucial to developing this interdisciplinary research and training,” said O’Hern. “The thought of it going away is scary, stressful and sad.”

Corey? Do you know what Yale’s currently hoarding in its endowment? Do you know that your university sits on thirty billion dollars? If you don’t realize that Yale doesn’t need Sackler money, I find that scary, stressful and sad. Just ask Andrew Kolodny:

Despite benefits from the Sackler Institute, Kolodny maintained that Yale has a moral impetus to rename the program. “Yale University, if they are taking money from the Sacklers, they are taking blood money,” Kolodny argued. “That money came from the marketing of the Sackler family’s activities which led to millions of people becoming addicted and thousands of people dying.”

“I think Yale University can afford to give the Sacklers back their money,” he added.

‘… David Blight, a history professor and a member of the committee … said the Sackler program is just one of many potentially unsavory names at Yale. The renaming of Yale Commons as the Schwarzman Center following a donation from Stephen Schwarzman ’69, a private equity manager who served briefly on one of President Donald Trump’s business advisory councils, also spurred contention on campus this year. [UD wouldn’t take his name off a building for that reason; but surely Yale could find gross shit out about Schwarzman unrelated to Trump…]

“The reality is, as you know, this is how major universities function. Almost everything here has someone’s name on it,” said Blight. “My first reaction, I’m afraid, is skepticism, because behind great wealth there is always going to be an awkward story. Behind great wealth there will be a crooked path of some type, whether that wealth was made in fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, real estate or finance.”’

Yes, it’s icing on the cake that the guy’s name is Blight.

He doth speak the truth. Almost all the major moneybags – David Rockefeller comes to mind as one of the highest-profile, at Harvard – are unsavory, and plenty of them go beyond that, well in the direction of Sackler criminality. I mean, Steven Cohen? Pretty much anyone at Yeshiva University? Don’t get me started. Blight’s right that going down that road means noisy incessant sandblasting.

The Harvard Art Museums’ public relations office directed all Sackler-related questions to Patrick McKiernan, a spokesman for Harvard.

McKiernan said Harvard was “not interested in participating” and hung up the phone.

Trying the Haughty Hahvard approach … We’ll see how that goes …

For Andrew Kolodny, co-director of Opioid Policy Research at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Purdue’s wrongdoing is the Sacklers’ wrongdoing. As the inventors and owners of Purdue, the Sacklers deserve the “lion’s share” of the blame for America’s opioid crisis, he said.

He explained that the United States’ opioid epidemic is as severe as it is because the medical community began aggressively to prescribe opioids in the ’90s in response to what Kolodny deems a “brilliant marketing campaign” carried out by Purdue. He said the company has faced legal consequences for some of the specific ways in which it marketed OxyContin, but it was never punished for the “nonbranded marketing” they performed by persuading the medical community to feel more comfortable prescribing opioids.