Now this is impressive. This UD must share with you; and in addition UD must bow to the Greek people.

To be so supremely gangrenous, so suppuratingly pus-ridden, as to face expulsion from arguably the world’s most infected body (FIFA!!); to be so persistently, so top-to-bottom violent — from gun-wielding team owners who rush the pitch and threaten referees, to alcoholic fascists in the stands who beat the shit out of everyone — is truly to have accomplished something grand.

But of course the expulsion will never happen. Did Hitler expel Goering from the party because he was too anti-semitic? In world football, you can’t be too corrupt or too violent.

… and today’s student sit-in at cash-machine-for-administrators Howard University shouts it out: At some point, a university becomes so squalid that its students have no choice but to take over running it from the knaves on the board of trustees. Just as seventeen year olds have to change America’s gun laws, nineteen year olds have to run Howard University.

Maya McCollum, a 19-year-old freshman who helped organize the sit-in, said on Friday that the news of [massively] misappropriated financial aid money was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

It’s all about the culture of the school, and making sure student culture matches administrative culture. Here, there’s a terrible mismatch. The Howard student culture has long been thoughtful, subversive, principled; the administrative culture has long been what’s in it for me. And so you generate the sort of conflict we see right now.

A shining example of a complete match between students and administration is self-righteous, rapeaholic, Baylor University. Baylor just gave a gift of fifteen million dollars to the football coach who oversaw, for years, large-scale rape on the school’s football team, and who recently filed a massive libel lawsuit against the school (he eventually dropped it – I guess when he got wind of the fact that Baylor was going to give him fifteen million dollars…). Do you hear a peep out of anyone – students, faculty – about their money having gone to someone who initiated a multimillion dollar lawsuit against their school? Who looked the other way (or worse) while his players raped and raped and raped?

Baylor still faces multiple expensive lawsuits from victims of its football players… I mean, think of all the university funds it’s losing in this long disgraceful spectacle. But do you see any student protest? Even a mild letter to the editor of the school newspaper? NO. Baylor’s full of good Christian rape-apologists. One for all and all for one.

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

UD thanks Dirk.

Some stories write themselves.

Actually, what you’ve probably learned from reading UD all these years is that almost all stories write themselves, because human beings are limited creatures and the number of plots (conundrums) they can create for themselves is therefore also strictly limited.

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

The profoundly pious get rich quick crook who finally gets picked up by the police and carted away to make room for the next profoundly etc. is such an old story.

Specifically, twas ever thus: Credulous grasping god-fearing dolts find a charismatic spiritual/financial advisor who writes best-sellers with titles like The Gospel of Good Success and Entrepreneurial Faith.

The particular guy in question today even has a degree from (wait for it) the Wharton School! (Feast your eyes on America’s Richest Source of Financial Criminals.) He allegedly sold

$3.4 million worth of pre-revolutionary Chinese bonds, which were in default, to the “vulnerable and elderly.”

Southern Methodist U., one of the most pious and dirtiest universities around, had the dude on their board of trustees until recently. They dodged a bullet on that one. Maybe they knew something before the feds did — though, in fairness, they could have told the world about it and maybe spared the vulnerable and elderly their full measure of exploitation.

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

But anyway. Another high-toned man of god will be stepping up to the podium soon. It’s a never-ending story.

– has long assumed, correctly, that its ridiculous trustees will listen to the shit the athletics department tells them year after year about taking care of that pesky deficit. Crazed highly-paid coaches, some still working for the school, others suing the school; games in which no one takes any interest; student athletic fees through the roof; academic quality in the toilet; a deer in the headlights president and an empty-threat legislature – you know the drill. Trustees know the drill…

Cuz everything’s gonna be fine as soon as the athletics department not only kills the deficit, but starts making HUGE money. Hold onto your Stetson!

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

But every now and then there’s a kind of … eruption on the part of one of the trustees. One of them suddenly flies over the cuckoo’s nest and lets out his anger at having been lied to and infantilized for years and years and years. It never seems to happen at our most craven sports factories – Auburn, Nebraska, Louisville – but it can certainly happen elsewhere. Because it’s very rare and beautiful and precious and fleeting, like one brief brilliant flash of a peacock’s tail, we take note of it here at University Diaries.

Rob Doughty, president of the UNM Board of Regents – which is responsible for signing off on years of consistently failing budgets from [the] university’s athletics department – says he feels he’s been lied to and won’t rubber stamp any future athletics budgets nor consider forgiving any of the department’s estimated $7.5 million deficit before seeing significant changes.

… “I want to know right now, in front of everybody, why are we [this much] in the hole when I was promised last year that we had a balanced budget?” Doughty intensely questioned.

… “I’m very upset today. I feel like this Board of Regents and the folks that were there, and especially me, were misled and were told things that weren’t true. And [athletics was] making false promises.

“And, I have to say, that in my time at this university in the last four years, as I sit here today, I think I’m as mad as I’ve ever been…. I think the projection line was done just to balance the budget…. [I] want to know what research was done, what analysis was done to really back the projected figures.”

Hey can’t put one over on Doubty Doughty. That projection line was done just to balance the budget!

I’m sorry, kiddies. Either all of these people are idiots, or this is the way they want things to be. It’s a way of life. You don’t get to break in, a century after the cargo cult has established itself, and say Maybe building a landing strip for magical gifts won’t make the magical gifts appear…

Back in the day, Southern Illinois University’s president Glenn Poshard was found to have plagiarized in sections of both his master’s and his PhD. He shed public tears, and the internal group of hacks assigned to exonerate him promptly did so. An SIU emerita professor summed it all up succinctly: I quote her in my headline.

Those wondering about the fate of Hobart and William Smith president Gregory Vincent can take heart. Tears will be shed, and we will be assured by an internal committee that innocent mistakes were made. There’s plenty of precedent for this. This is how it’s done.

… the Second Amendment.

*********

The opinion piece itself.

**********

This is a 97-year-old dude saying his final important stuff. Not “strategic,” everyone says. But they might be wrong. Roiling the waters is what this is called, and now that the rallies are over, we need to keep roiling them. This is today’s roil. Good.

**********

“[A] significant chunk of the Democratic electorate would be willing to support a much more restrictive gun-policy agenda than the party currently supports. The coming of age of the so-called ‘mass shooting generation’ may increase that divide.”

REMINGTON FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY

Well lookee all you big strong men
Sandy Hook sued your ass again
They got your guns in a terrible jam
Made you stop going bam bam bam
So pay off your debt and put down your gun
Gonna have a whole lotta fun

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
First goal your weaponry
Next goal insolvency

And it’s five, six, ‘leven
Now declaring bankruptcy
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Remy! your gun’s gonna die

Yeah come on Wall Street don’t be slow
AR-15 gonna lose you dough
Used to be plenty good money made
Selling Steve Paddock tools of his trade
Now instead of making loot
You got a helluva class action suit

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
First goal’s your weaponry
Next goal insolvency

And it’s five, six, ‘leven
Now declaring bankruptcy
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Remy! your gun’s gonna die

Shaking My Head, the man says. Shaking my head cuz one day before the big scrimmage a chunk of the team attacked police and property outside a bar last night. This program, the man says.

But it isn’t just the program, right? Texas Tech is a university; a university whose current national rank is #176 , down twenty points from a couple of years ago. A real trailer park of a place, with violent tailgaters, sadistic coaches, 1500 current lawsuits from dismissed sadistic coaches, a freshman who a few weeks ago got annoyed and took his handgun out and blew the head off of a campus security guy, and, well, there’s jest a ton of stuff like that about this great Lubbock institution. Ask me about Alberto Gonzales!

So … shaking your head? You live in the world’s biggest academic shithole. There’s not enough room in all that shit to move your head, let alone shake it.

**********

UD thanks JND.

… and beating her to a pulp for refusing the client.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

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

Wilfred Owen
1917

… in UD‘s humble opinion,
is a stroll through Jardin des Plantes,
ending in mint tea at
La Mosquée Salon De Thé.

Which is what La Kid and Mr UD
are doing even as we speak.

… (Mr UD gave a talk
about economic development;
La Kid organized a conference)…

UD‘s little family enjoys
a beautiful Parisian morning.

Paris. Sends this photo from her hotel.

Might be stuck there for awhile,
what with the strikes and all.

Poor kid.

“Collectively all of these items certainly suggest a specific recipe for large-scale destruction,” said Peter Tyler, Ithaca’s police chief, [about a Cornell student’s pantry stockpile of “an AR-15-style rifle, a shrapnel bomb fashioned from a firework, more than 300 rounds of ammunition for various guns, a bulletproof vest, a homemade silencer, trauma supplies and food rations.”].

Yum! Simple, easy to assemble ingredients, and a real treat for everyone outside your eighth-floor window.

‘Our Generation was Raised Around Schools Being Shot Up,’ Says Stoneman Douglas Survivor.