[University of Louisville President James] Ramsey has been in hot water with the university as faculty and staff have polled for a no-confidence vote due to negative publicity and claims of mismanagement. U of L and the Foundation have also been in an ongoing state audit, which was stalled by late submissions from the university three weeks ago…

… Ramsey was paid $2.8 million by the University of Louisville Foundation in 2014, $1 million more than he was paid in 2013.

… Age.

************
UD thanks Barney.

Thus sayeth UD: He who goes after a President for going down will himself go down.

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

And suddenly there appeared The President of the Baylor Men, praising football, and saying:

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest my rapists to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With shame, disgrace, and getting fired.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a chancellor and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

It’s within range of both Oregon State University and the University of Oregon.

So pathetic, what’s happened to the American university. One prominent lawyer consults another about how to run a university and this is what he’s told.

UD was amused, later in the Inside Higher Ed account of The Passion of Ken Starr and (according to reports) The Impending Martyrdom Of The Athletic Department, to read that Baylor’s orgiastic adoration of football “has concerned some on campus, who worry that a university so focused on football could lose sight of its Baptist mission.” Don’t they understand what everyone else understands? That there’s no light between Football and Faith?

Oh beautiful Starr the hope of light
Guiding the players through their indict
All through the courts ’till break of dawn
Into the land of Next Game Day
He does give out a lovely ray
Oh beautiful Starr of Baylor shine on

When Baylor was winning football games and no one in a position of authority had yet been booted out because of arrant indifference to sexual assault, one of the trustees described life on campus as “like an early rapture.” What will the people of Baylor do now that other teams are lifted up and they remain behind in Tribulation?

UD‘s advice: Win some football games.

How I wonder what you are
Are you in or are you out?
What is Baylor’s board about?
Twinkle twinkle little Starr
How I wonder what you are.

***********

UD thanks Van.

One of [William O’Brien’s] “patients” was a burly Pagan who boldly stated on his intake form that he “had been pregnant several times…”

Duma member Igor Igoshin allegedly earned his economics degree by turning someone else’s paper on the Russian chocolate industry into a thesis on meat; the dissertation replaced every mention of “chocolate” with “beef,” “dark chocolate” with “home-grown beef,” and “white chocolate” with “imported beef.” All numbers, charts, and analysis were preserved in their original form. More recently, Dissernet revealed that an oncologist named Yuri Tsarapkin had handed in a medical article about breast cancer that was adapted—data and all—from someone else’s paper on stomach cancer. That paper, which was presented as a study of human subjects, turned out to have been plagiarized from yet another source: a study of cancer in dogs and rats.

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

UD thanks Jeff.

A little of everything at

seven AM. Contrails, dark
clouds, light clouds, sunrays,
sunlight, blue sky, sand, waves.

At 7:15, I’m at the

Coffee Mill.

Sang two songs on the
walk: Nessun Dorma
to start… And would
have stayed with this
throughout, but the
Coffee Mill had a Piaf
imitator piped in,
singing Sous le Ciel de Paris,
so UD had no choice
but to perform that one.

She of course will blog from there.

The poet at Donald Trump’s inauguration will be Frederick Seidel.

A Texas writer grapples with the philosophical implications of Baylor’s conscience-of-a-nation president, the man who had WHAT to say about Bill Clinton’s fellatio with a White House intern, now clammin’ right up when it comes to his football players. Title of the writer’s article:

Ken Starr, Full Monty on Fellatio 18 Years Ago, All Shy Now About Baylor Rapes

When Lewinsky describes the sex she had back then, she says it happened because “I fell in love with my boss.”

When scads of Baylor women describe the sex they recently had, with members of the football team, they don’t talk about love. They just go straight to the police reports.

[Ken] Starr .. wanted to make fellatio a national issue … And now that Starr is president of a Baptist university, he and the regents of his school are cloaking themselves in legalisms and claims of privacy on the arguably much more urgent question of serial campus rape.

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

To jog your memory:

Starr, whose main claim to fame at Baylor has been beefing up the football team and building a new stadium, now has two star players in prison for rape, a third about to be tried, another player expelled, a fraternity president arrested and charged. This occurs against a backdrop of foot-dragging on federally mandated anti-rape measures and a pattern of stony silence roundly decried by national and Texas media including even the university’s hometown newspaper, The Waco Tribune.

The Silence of the Starrs. We’ve had a lot of that, haven’t we? Brings to mind that Edgar Lee Masters poem…

I have known the silence of the Starrs and of their teams,
And the silence of the buck when it’s passed,
And the silence of the AD and the Assistant AD,
And the silence for which juries alone find the word,
And the silence of trustees before football season begins,
And the silence of boosters …

… the law school.

Baylor University:

[A] nationally-ranked football powerhouse that can be classified as anything but Christian: a program that has developed into a nightmare of criminality engulfing the entire school community…

[We are following] the horrific news that has been spilling out of Waco, Texas regarding the overall tone and personality of the football program and the despicable actions of an inordinate [number] of their players over the years…

[Baylor features] an accepted culture of severe criminal behavior, sexual assaults and rapes …

[Baylor’s football coach] willingly and purposely recruited some terrible characters who he, his staff, the university and the local police department allowed to run amok while terrorizing a community.