Two Chicago-area priests were charged Monday with Lewd and Lascivious behavior and Indecent Exposure after being caught performing a sexual act inside a car parked on a Miami Beach street.

… 25-year-old Shane Colombo, a native of Sun City, California, was in the 7600 block of North Clark Street in the Rogers Park neighborhood at about 8:25 p.m. Sunday when he was caught in crossfire between two people, Chicago police said. A statement from the university said Colombo was waiting at a bus stop.

Colombo was struck in his abdomen and was taken to Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston, where was pronounced dead at 9:02 p.m., police said.

… Colombo was planning to join Northwestern’s psychology Ph.D. program as an incoming student this fall, according to a statement from university officials. He received a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University and was in the process of moving to Chicago from New York, where he was a researcher at Columbia University’s Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab.

Yogurt and all.

How long can a university football program remain on automatic?

A hollowed-out, expensive, stadium; a perennially losing team; staggering costs to students and faculty; a statewide embarrassment… Yet on it goes, tearing down the reputation and finances of a university forever and ever.

Take University of Kansas football. This 2015 article called the program “doomed,” but it wasn’t, even though the millionaire coaches, million-dollar buyouts, and on-field losses continue.

Increased football spending was supposed make more money for the entire Kansas athletic department. It has not. Instead, there has been a domino effect of failure: Kansas is second to last in the Big 12 in the number of men’s and women’s teams it fields…

This fall, Kansas fans figure to have a front row seat to the worst college football team money can buy — and a up-close view of how everyone else loses in the process.

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

Apparently it’s all finally too much for one KU professor – a guy in the law school has tweeted:

What’s the argument for continuing KU football (serious question)? It’s an enormous money loser for a cash-strapped university. Life-altering injuries and cumulative brain damage are inevitable. Wouldn’t this money be better spent elsewhere (e.g. more scholarships)?

To charge KU students higher fees to support the football team (the biggest drain on KU’s athletic budget) just seems wrong. With yesterday’s loss to Nicholls St., it seems like an appropriate time to ask: why have a football team?

Not that this guy’s tweet will go anywhere; but UD thinks it’s worth noting that at least one person on KU’s campus is asking these questions.

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

UPDATE: And then there’s the University of Maryland. A columnist in the school newspaper first reviews the program: Lots of seriously losing seasons; excessive and expensive coach changes; shitty game attendance; the heatstroke death of a player on the practice field; damning reports in the sports press of a “toxic culture” in the program.

In light of these problems and others, the time has come for frank discussion of a question seemingly absent from the discourse surrounding athletics at this university — namely, whether the university should continue to sponsor a varsity football program at all. There are a few compelling reasons to think the answer is a resounding “no.”

The whole massively costly football deal is “a project that will be useless to the vast majority of the student body.” Football players get concussed and may suffer lifelong brain injury.

Very nice final paragraph:

President Wallace Loh’s favorite metaphor for athletics is that they’re the “front porch” of the university, the face we present to the public. Allow me to extend the metaphor. If your front porch regularly required multi-million-dollar improvements, caused brain disease in those who sat on it and recently left someone dead, wouldn’t you consider removing it?

Bravo.

Now that a major Israeli tech company has boycotted El Al — “We don’t do business with companies that discriminate.” — the airline has released a statement that they will do things differently. They won’t hold up their flights for hours as they negotiate with ultra orthodox men who refuse to sit next to women. In fact, “from now on, a passenger who refuses to sit next to another passenger will be immediately removed from the flight.”

To which UD says, take a look at Israel’s national education mandate. The same ultra orthodox refuse to follow it, and Israel lets them refuse to follow it, but the country still refers to its national education mandate. So El Al can make all the announcements it wants, but they’re as scared of the ultra orthodox as everyone else in Israel, and will in practice continue to give in to their disgusting behavior on their planes.

******

Why? Put yourself on the plane, okay? Twenty ultra orthodox men – in collective protest against one of their group having been seated next to a woman – are standing in the middle aisle and refusing to sit down. A couple of them have wrapped cellophane all over their bodies because the plane will be flying over cemeteries.

Everyone else on the plane, as it sits forever on the tarmac, is creeped out and angry.

“Okay, new policy!” says a steward. “The guy refusing to sit next to a woman will now be immediately removed from the flight.”

Screaming ensues from the men in the aisle, who continue to refuse to move.

What’s El Al’s policy on passengers who refuse to sit down? Do you think they’re going to make all of these guys get off the plane?

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

The problem in Israel, and on its planes, is that the ultra orthodox can be violent. Hardliners among them are pretty routinely violent. I don’t think El Al wants pitched battles on its planes. I don’t think it wants the interiors of its planes trashed.

There will be more and more boycotts until – you knew this was coming – El Al lays on ultra orthodox only planes.

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

We have followed the El Al situation on this blog for a long time. Just put El Al Israel in my search engine.

You can bet on it.

… begins!

UD thanks Betty for the picture.

Seven Florida Gators have been suspended for the season opener against Charleston Southern.

Dynamic sophomore receiver Kadarius Toney and senior defensive end CeCe Jefferson headline the list of players.

The suspension of Toney and reserve defensive tackle Kyree Campbell stems from their role May 28 altercation on campus with a group of local Gainesville men. Jefferson will sit out due to academic reasons, a source confirmed.

Defensive tackle Luke Ancrum, cornerback Brian Edwards, tailback Adarius Lemons and walk-on offensive lineman James Washington also will not play.

Toney and Campbell brandished Airsoft rifles during the confrontation in May. Then on July 22, police stopped Toney for a seat belt violation and discovered an assault rifle in his backseat.

Four Gators — receivers Tyrie Cleveland and Rick Wells, quarterback Emory Jones and tight end Kemore Gamble – lied to university police when questioned about the incident and had to appear in front of the student conduct council. None was suspended.

And every one of them on scholarship!

Well, that one’s got it all. A poorly ranked university whose students don’t even care about football lies pathetically about game attendance at its newly renovated stadium. Does it get any lower?

At Arkansas, which stumbled its way through a 4-8 season last year, scanned attendance was 58 percent of its announced figures. No matter, the Razorbacks’ football stadium is reopening this season with an increased capacity of 4,000 following a $160 million renovation project.

“[P]hony attendance figures are … another small piece of the rickety structure that holds up the college sports scam,” notes Deadspin‘s writer.

Another small piece?

The NCAA supposedly requires a 15,000 “actual or paid” two-year average attendance to stay in D-I, but even that threat appears to be completely toothless. According to the WSJ, “The NCAA accepts the announced attendance numbers schools submit ‘at face value.’”

And why? Why, why, why?

You know UD‘s take on why a school whose students don’t attend football games would spend tens of millions of dollars enlarging their stadium, right?

It’s because they can’t think of anything else to do. What else do universities… do?

COLLEGE FOOTBALL ATTENDANCE PROBABLY WON’T COME BACK,
BUT AT LEAST THERE’S BOOZE TO KEEP THE REVENUE FLOWING

In other words: Game day!

“And I can sit here and tell you over the past few weeks our team has gotten stronger.”

Ohio State University football coach.

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.

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

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.