The state is a perennial Number One on Most Corrupt States lists; the university, which is ALL about football, issues presidential directives on cowbells. And no one would notice or be in any way surprised that Mississippi State has just welcomed with open arms a guy currently facing charges for beating the shit out of a woman – a beating you can watch on YouTube (take your pick) – if it weren’t for the current unpleasantness at Baylor… I mean, you know, it’s the SEC… Who really gives a rat’s ass? Be it ever so decadent, there’s no place like that y’all and shut ma mouth land… Don’t think y’all gonna find one person, male or female persuasion, who ain’t prepared to forgive Jeffery Simmons if he do get a bit out of hand… Small price to pay for one hell of a defensive end.

And here’s a sign of the times! Mississippi State is currently issuing protective helmets to all its women students. Distribution is mandatory but you can choose to wear yours or not.

Why do you think Beware the B-School Boys is one of this blog’s perennially popular categories? If the statement in my headline is true, or roughly true, what do you think places like Wharton, which not only produced Donald Trump and Raj Rajatnaram and Steven Cohen and many of their, er, close associates, but boasts a long glorious history of producing scads of America’s most spectacular thieves, have been teaching people all these years? I mean, not the specific content of courses… I mean the gestalt.

And what a remarkable fact about American culture, that we have these gilded b-schools specializing in predatory capitalism. And the highest-profile b-school of them all produced not only the founder of Trump University, but – possibly – the next president of the United States.

In the aftermath of the UCLA shooting, Scott Jaschik reviews what we know about the origins and characteristics of such events. Which isn’t much. Fields like engineering, math, and biology do seem to produce most of the attacks, but nursing professors and comp lit professors have also in recent years been murdered by disgruntled students.

I think that “spark” idea gets us somewhere. My own review of these attacks conjures, pretty consistently, a paranoid loser smoldering with rage.

Et alors? All professors who teach long enough encounter students whose behavior unsettles them. Maybe frightens them. (Professors lucky enough to teach on gun-friendly campuses get to worry that these unbalanced individuals may be packing heat.) Behind the vague word assessment lies the hard reality that most of us will never actually report a student, that we expect university settings to be about intensity and struggle and not giving up on people. Several of these killings came after a perpetual grad student was finally dropped from a program. University settings tolerate the sort of bizarre behavior that corporations would boot out the door in minutes.

For what it’s worth – killers in university settings (I’m thinking of professors who kill professors too, like the notorious Amy Bishop) aren’t just paranoid, from what I can tell. They are often strikingly grandiose, arrogant people. They kill those who refuse to acknowledge their superiority. They are solving a problem: They are ridding the world of people whose existence threatens their god-like self-perception. Professors who give middling or failing grades to shaky people who consider themselves transcendent geniuses would be at risk.

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

The gunman has been identified.

[William] Klug was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and had been the target of [Mainak] Sarkar’s anger on social media for months. On March 10, Sarkar called the professor a “very sick person” who should not be trusted.

“William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy,” Sarkar wrote. “He made me really sick. Your enemy is my enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust.”

A source called the gunman’s accusations “absolutely untrue.”

“The idea that somebody took his ideas is absolutely psychotic,” the source said.

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

… Sarkar has been studying for his PhD since 2006 with no graduating date, two years longer than any of the other researchers.

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

The killer had a list of targets and killed one of them – a woman who lived in his Minnesota town – before driving to LA and killing Krug.

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

The woman was his ex-wife.

Coverage here.

**********

Now confirmed: A graduate student “despondent about his grades” kills his professor.

Watch live from the shooter-copter as we try to find the guy gunning down people at UCLA.

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

Two dead. Shooter apparently still at large.

Rape, unreported, robs me of my rest:
Rape, silly rape, our ardent team encumbers:
Rape, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest,
And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers!

Trump University or another for-profit school?

Trump University had one major difference with all these other for-profit colleges. Because it was unlicensed and unaccredited, it was not eligible for federal student grants and loans. The for-profit college industry has been taking as much as $32 billion a year in this funding. So while the cost of Trump University’s abuses came down only on its students, the other colleges have spread this misery among students, many of them lower-income than the typical Trump enrollee, but also on taxpayers.

But misogynistic thuggery IS Waco! Every city has to be about something, and only Waco boasts a biker massacre at a breastaurant, Branch Davidian child rape, and a religious university complicit in the rape of its women students.

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

Baylor University: Stupid is as stupid does.

The disregard for victims at Baylor wasn’t some kind of oversight. It wasn’t merely callous. It was sick. What kind of adult looks into the beseeching face of a young victim who could be his or her own daughter and decides that football is more important?

The Ken Starr kind. The same kind that went after the Clintons, first on trumped up public charges, then for sex. It’s this very cycle of history, coming back to take Starr down at last, that Baylor missed seeing over its shoulder and now is bumbling and stumbling in panic to evade.

[A New York City public swimming pool is] unmoored from the laws of New York City and the Constitution, and commonly held principles of fairness and equal access… Orthodox Jewish beliefs demand modesty in dress, and a strict separation of the sexes, and those are the beliefs to which the taxpayer-owned-and-operated Metropolitan Recreation Center will yield [in mandating sex-segregated swimming hours].

[The city cannot let stand this] religious intrusion into a secular space. [The city should] immediately end religious segregation in the pools…

Let those who cannot abide public, secular rules at a public, secular pool find their own private place to swim…

Bravo, New York Times.

… the poor.

Fraternities create drug distribution gangs; the Wharton School creates insider trader gangs. University athletic teams create rape-gangs and theft-gangs. At the very highest levels, your team of trustees creates international news.

Campuses are places where you connect with people like yourself – people who have similar strong interests and ambitions. Of course in most cases those ambitions aren’t criminal. But if they are, the isolated secret-brotherhood hothouse intensity of certain campus groups, the general public’s romanticization of college and graduate students as inquiring innocents, and the often rabid winner-take-all ideology of some of these associations (the athletes’ cafeteria at the University of Oregon has EAT YOUR ENEMIES in big illuminated letters on the wall), will make it temptingly easy to criminalize your association, if that’s what you’d like to do.

Not everyone on your wrestling team – to take the latest example, from the University of Minnesota – will want to take part in your Xanax distribution conspiracy. But the beauty of things like wrestling teams is that, once inducted into the brotherhood, it’s unlikely even non-participants will squeal.

My point is that when you’ve already got an organized team, you make much easier the transition to organized crime. There’s a lot of disorganized drug selling and buying at colleges, but it’s always going to be small time, and it’s going to be vulnerable to detection (see Wesleyan University). Fraternity drug rings only seem to get infiltrated after they’ve had a chance to grow enormously, as at San Diego State. The Minnesota gang seems to have had a chance to grow similarly huge — it handles spectacular quantities of Xanax.

*****************
UD thanks two readers
for telling her about
the Gophers and the Xanax.

… have all featured the camp followers and comfort women that typically accompany men in battle. The commanders of Waco’s Branch Davidians, in their protracted campaign against the government, prostituted the daughters of sect adherents. At the outset of pagan hostilities at Waco’s Twin Peaks, breastaurant women ran for their lives. Coeds at Baylor University knew to run just as fast when any of the men running the ball for the greater good of Baptism approached.

Davidian, Pagan, Baptist – whatever the divine cause, Waconan soldiers will make sexual use of women. It’s the Waco way.

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

Eh. It’s the world’s way. When the bellicose righteous fight their righteous cause…

[Dominique] Strauss-Kahn … told the court that group-sex sessions were rare “recreation” in his hectic schedule as IMF chief, taking place only four times a year because he had been very busy “saving the world from catastrophe” at the time of the US sub-prime crisis.

Recipe for a successful marriage.

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

UD thanks Barney.

… can thank Judge Gonzalo Curiel for opening the annals of Trump University, a landmark postmodern school. Until the inauguration of the University of California Goldman Sachs, Trump U. will continue to stand as our nation’s most cutting-edge institution.

— Now what is the meaning of this word retreat and why is it allowed on all hands to be a most salutary practice for all who desire to lead before God and in the eyes of men a truly christian life? A retreat, my dear boys, signifies a withdrawal for awhile from the cares of our life, the cares of this workaday world, in order to examine the state of our football program, to reflect on the mysteries of holy gridiron and to understand better why we are here in this league. During these few days I intend to put before you some thoughts concerning the four last things. They are, as you know, the NCAA death penalty, retrenchment (for this we look in fellowship to our Brother in Football, Southern Methodist University), new recruitment, and the wondrous beginning of a Rebirth in Football. We shall try to understand them fully during these few days so that we may derive from the understanding of them a lasting benefit to our win/loss stats. And remember, my dear boys, that we have been sent into this world for one thing and for one thing alone: to win football games no matter the price. All else is worthless. One thing alone is needful, the regional championship. What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he suffer the loss of his coach? Ah, my dear boys, believe me there is nothing in this wretched world that can make up for such a loss.