And the silver lining in the long tragicomic thing the NYU sexual harassment mess is turning out to be is that it directs us again to the final two sections of Camille Paglia’s hilarious 1992 essay about people like Avital Ronnel, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders.” Camille, it’s been too long.

I flashed onto Paglia’s classic when I read these sentences, written today in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by a woman who, very unhappily, worked as a grad student at NYU with Ronnel:

Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it.

Her point is that deconstructive method has given academics sympathetic to Ronnel a way to sidestep the obvious abuse she doled out to the complainant – by theorizing and complexifying and performatizing human behavior. Derrida showed everyone the way when he denied his friend Paul de Man’s fascism by fogging it up so thoroughly that nothing meant anything.

This is the Paglia excerpt that came back to me:

Hey, fellas: there’s something out there that electrocutes people on beaches, collapses buildings like cardboard, and drowns ships and villages. It’s called nature. The next time the western horizon flames with crimson, remember that this is what Foucault never saw.

Richard Rorty, too, came to mind:

When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ‘problematizing familiar concepts.’

Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.

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The clear and present realities the letter-writers in this case theorized away were, UD thinks, two:

1. Some human beings are very cruel.
2. Human collectives have a perennial tendency to degenerate into gangs that punish outsiders.

An Ohio State University trustee has resigned, “embarrassed,” he says, to continue his association with a university BOT that cares more about games than … well, than about anything. Apparently this guy thinks he’s still dealing with a university, rather than a football team and its devoted servants.

“Most [trustees] were concerned about whether it was a several-game suspension or not,” he said.

“To me,” he added, “there was something altogether wrong about reducing it to a couple of games.”

Best for all concerned for him to leave the board. The Dear Leader will be pissed if this jerk is still there when he retakes control.

[Avital] Ronell’s work strikes me as a big bowl of word salad. But I understand that the general project of deconstruction is the analysis and dismantling of conscious and unconscious structures of power. How odd, then, that these professors could see domination operating everywhere except the one place they could actually do something about it: in their own relations with students.

So now with all this talk of vanishingly few people going to football games (we’ve been talking about it on this blog for a long time), UD is here to tell you the truth about why it’s happening.

Recall Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous dictum – Existence precedes essence. With football, it’s equally existential, though with a twist.

Existence precedes putrescence.

Did you know NASCAR attendance/viewership is also tanking, at an even faster rate than university football? NFL attendance/viewership is down too.

The core problem is one of – incremental, to be sure, but real enough – civilizational progress. We are failing to replicate yahoos.

With each passing year, our young men look at stands rich with drunks either screaming at fields rich with assholes, or enduring fifteen minutes of ads screamed at them from stadiums rich with Adzillatrons, and they ask themselves: Is it just me, or is this disgusting? Am I alone in feeling kind of dirtied up by what I’m being put through here? By the sort of people I’m supposed to be cheering for? By the whole cheesy exploitative atmosphere? Does anyone else notice the hypocrisy of all this clean-cut Americanism as the world’s thinnest overlay for greedy coaches, concussed players, and the total domination of tv revenue?

In short:

I have a life (that’s the “existence” part) and I don’t have to spend one moment of it with this rottenness (putrescence).

The problem is particularly acute on college campuses, where a real-time war is being waged between the pressure from the institution to civilize, and the pressure from the game to barbarize. At least NASCAR isn’t being staged on the fields of Harvard! The great disadvantage under which college football labors is its proximity to sources of human development.

As universities respond by retrofitting stadiums with less and less seating, it’s going to occur to them that things like football and NASCAR are assuming the subcultural status of professional wrestling and motorcycle gangs. Schools will begin the titanic task of dismantling the vast smoky hollow that was their football stadium.

Watch the demolition, and you will be reminded of people all over Europe pulling down statues of Lenin.

All-male, all-football Ohio State University gets the full New York Times treatment as it generates the sort of outrageous scandals (see, most recently, all-male, all-football Baylor) all-male, all-football settings (see Penn State) tend to generate.

At the end of its article about local reactions to the most high-profile of its many current scandals (the wife beaters and the male buddies who ignore the wife beating scandal), the NYT reporters quote a guy saying “[we] don’t want Ohio State just viewed as a football factory.”

But look up at the opening paragraphs of the story: its culture of sports above all.

Sorry, babe. That’s the definition of a football factory.

Own it. And pay for it.

Lawsuits stemming from abuse cases have led to multimillion-dollar settlements at other universities. Earlier this year, Michigan State set aside $500 million to settle with hundreds of victims of Lawrence G. Nassar, a university physician who sexually abused hundreds of young women, including prominent gymnasts. A few years ago, Penn State agreed to settlements totaling nearly $100 million with more than 30 victims of the former football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of sexually assaulting boys.

Get out your wallet. And keep it out.

In one of many similar pathetic appeals across the nation, Minnesota’s Star Tribune editorial board begs its readers to go to its state university’s football games. The prospect of what looks to be 13,000 empty seats at UM’s opening game (“cold weather will not be a legitimate excuse for staying away”) seems to have generated panic and depression at the newspaper, which no doubt realizes that widespread and growing indifference to the game will have a serious impact on its circulation and ad revenue and all.

But look how they make the case, petites.

The university has made a large investment in coaching salaries and facilities. Gophers fans can be part of the solution by buying tickets, getting the maroon and gold out of the closet and coming back to campus on game days.

Parsing the logic here is a challenge. I guess the crux of the thing lies in the word “solution.” Uh… because UM, over intense local opposition, insisted on building a stadium it can’t afford, and because it hires incredibly expensive jerks throughout its athletics programs, the citizens of the state must bail it out of all the financial and legal and reputational problems it has predictably brought on itself.

UM, in other words, has done its part in steadily bankrupting itself, demanding more and more sports money from its students, and making the school a laughingstock when its AD turns out to be a drunken idiot who reels around town “asking if he [can] perform oral sex” on random women; now the good people of Minnesota must do their part by spending huge money to attend games in which they have no interest.

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The Wall Street Journal just published a piece – COLLEGE FOOTBALL’S GROWING PROBLEM: EMPTY SEATS – which features in its first paragraphs (the only ones you can read without subscribing) the self-same University of Minnesota. It explains why the local editorialists pleaded with their readers not merely to buy tickets but to actually show up in the stadium on game day. WSJ:

When Minnesota hosted Nebraska at TCF Bank Stadium last year, the game featured charismatic new Golden Gophers coach P.J. Fleck, a home team fighting for a bowl berth and a big-name opponent. The announced attendance was 39,933—an OK crowd for a crisp November day in Minneapolis — but it didn’t tell the whole story.

Only 25,493 ticketed fans were counted at the gates, 36% lower than the announced attendance and about half of the stadium’s capacity. More than 14,000 people who bought tickets or got them for free didn’t show up.

These are routine, I know – but sometimes the details are good.

A Salem [Missouri] father and son both face weapon and drug offenses after a Saturday traffic stop located methamphetamine, heroin and a firearm…

… Leonard Eplin was making erratic movements towards the crotch of his pants and all three vehicle occupants were removed from the car. The vehicle was searched upon a K-9 officer indicating the odor of narcotics was present. An ammunition magazine containing four rounds was subsequently found under the front driver’s seat.

Upon initiating a search of the car’s trunk, Zakary and Leonard Eplin claimed it was inaccessible because it couldn’t be physically opened; however, it was found to easily open. Inside, a Taurus PT840 .40-caliber pistol matching the ammunition magazine was discovered wrapped in a black bandana inside a bag.

Zakary Eplin first denied ownership of the firearm but later said it was his upon his father telling officers his son had legally purchased it. When asked if he had anything illegal on his person, Leonard Eplin is quoted in the report as saying no and affirming, “I swear on my dead father’s grave.” A total of 17 heroin capsules and one gram of meth were later discovered hidden on his body while he was being processed for incarceration…

Glad you asked.

A second complaint of sexual misconduct against opera star, University of Michigan professor, David Daniels.

I thought things were quieting down (see this post), but Cornell University student journalists, taking note of the sexual harassment case that has “garnered widespread attention in academia and elsewhere,” have now attempted to ask three Cornell professors why they signed the now-notorious letter (“a terrible letter,” writes Masha Gessen in the New Yorker) defending the harasser.

Two of the professors responded like Donald Trump when asked by reporters about John McCain.

[Cathy] Caruth and [Cynthia] Chase declined to be interviewed by The Sun… Caruth said she understands “the general interest in this letter, but I feel it is too complex to be handled adequately through an interview for an article.”

The familiar too complex move – with its evasion, condescension, and self-aggrandizement – puts Caruth solidly in the Slytherin camp among the now-squabbling letter signers.

(Update: Here’s a whole analysis of the way the too complex bit has been used in this case.)

Slytherin because of what David Lehman memorably called the “slithering elusiveness” of the deconstructive analytical/argumentative method.

Rather than deal forthrightly with moral questions, you slither away by talking about complexity, or enigmatic gay coding, or the instability of signifiers. (The model here is Derrida’s 62-page dance around the obviousness of his friend Paul de Man’s wartime – lifetime, as it would turn out – degeneracy. “Borrowing Derrida’s logic, one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that its author was conflicted on the subject of the Jews,” as Lehman wrote.)

The Ravenclaws among the letter writers go the other way, seemingly forgetting everything they’ve learned and taught about a world of indeterminacy/performativity, and instead going right in for the linguistically transparent kill. “If any of the sexual contact alleged by the complainant had taken place,” writes Jonathan Culler to the Cornell reporter, “there would doubtless have been references to it in the emails,” and he doesn’t find any, so case closed. “If he effectively felt oppressed and harassed, there were ways of signalling this, which would have definitely not hurt his position,” announces Slavoj Zizek, taking up an astonishingly naive univocal position on the matter of language, not to mention cause and effect.

…they cling to guns and football.

But… you know… BRING ‘EM ON!

I suppose we should be grateful America’s latest obviously demented gun-bearer only killed two.

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[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

People seem to have tired of talking both about the Derrida Professor’s having been found guilty by NYU of sexual harassment, and the lawsuit the grad student she harassed has filed against her and the school. But Ronell’s animating intellectual commitment – deconstruction – is worth revisiting, and here are two comments on it, from very different political positions.

First: Martin Jay, reviewing, in 2011, a book of interviews with Ronell.

[Ronell] depends … heavily on mobilizing the tired rhetoric of combat that animated the “theory wars” of the 1980s. AR herself seems frozen in that moment, a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers on a remote Pacific island still fighting for the emperor long after he surrendered. There are, after all, just so many times you can act out Zéro de conduite before the audience gets tired of adolescent rebelliousness as a mode of critique. Intellectual mooning grows as tedious as the real thing. It is fair to say that the ranks of her regiment are in fact getting thinner and thinner as the scandal and provocation of deconstruction recede further into the past.

Second, Francis Fukuyama, in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Q. You have an unusual background for a political scientist. You majored in classics at Cornell, then did graduate work in comparative literature at Yale, where you studied with Paul de Man. Later you spent time in Paris sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Any memories from this journey through deconstruction?

A. I decided it was total bullshit. They were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth, there is no argument that’s superior to any other argument. Yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda. That seemed completely contradictory. If you really are a moral relativist, there is no reason why you shouldn’t affirm National Socialism or the racial superiority of Europeans, because nothing is more true than anything else. I thought it was a bankrupt way of proceeding and decided to shift gears and go into political science.

The superannuated subversion both men evoke suggests a reading of Ronell’s recent troubles in which, perversely, she rather got what she wanted: A new lease on academic deviancy.

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Which, Jay notes, Ronell believes Derrida invented.

“One cannot imagine how whited-out the academic corridor was when Derrida arrived on the American scene. There was really no room for deviancy, not even for a quaint aberration or psychoanalysis,” she asserts, blithely erasing Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, Natalie Zemon Davis, Hayden White, Florence Howe, etc., from memory.

At no point in a long article about an insane drop in participation does the reporter even vaguely, even tentatively, allude to some of the likeliest reasons UM’s incredibly expensive newish (2009) stadium stands more and more empty.

Of course the stadium almost never filled up for football (it can seat 80,000! but they count 50,000+ as a sell-out), never made the money its boosters said it would. Goes without saying. Boys will have their big toys, and students will pay for them.

But now it’s really getting bad. Embarrassing, in fact, as cameras pan vast viewing deserts, and as the university hemorrhages money.

The reporter duly writes down what the athletics people tell her about all the shit they’re doing to make it ever so much more fun to sit in a hellhole full of troublesome drunks (UM has already desperately made booze freely available) than watch on your phone, or, best of all, not watch at all. She says nothing about a raft of player and coach sex scandals, enormous buyouts of said coaches…

Somebody needs to tell her that spending a lot of time and money cheering on really gross people and programs isn’t an attractive prospect for a lot of students and locals. You can throw all the incentives you want at people, but if your program keeps pumping out scandals (and what program doesn’t?), you’re going to keep losing your audience.

Yes, that’s what we always think of first when we think of Berkeley, isn’t it? Sports.