Just because we’re violent unregenerate hazers who reportedly take photographs in our house of members holding AR-15s doesn’t mean we should be evicted! Couldn’t be more proud of Chandler Elmore, owner and transporter of multiple big firearms and a football hero recruited from darkest Ark. How dare Wash U drive us from our home.

“It’s obviously not coincidental that this most recent incident [the AR-15 in the frat house] corresponded with the timing of our permanent suspension. Clearly, this is what caused our removal from campus,” [the fraternity’s vice-president commented]. “We understand the school’s frustration regarding the alleged social events. However, we also have frustrations and complaints regarding the way the school handled the initial investigation (which prompted our original suspension) and subsequent investigations that they conducted.”

We didn’t really haze actually in fact when you look closely. These were just some alleged social events. As for the AR-15, none of us knew anything about that, we promise. I mean, haha, except Chandler! The last thing in the world we’re interested in – after getting wasted and torturing pledges – is playing with big scary guns.

Montgomery County police said that [Alwin] Chen’s home was searched and officials found multiple guns, including an AR-15-style rifle, ammunition, multiple grenades, a tactical vest, and a C4 landmine detonator…

Just a hop, skip, and a jump from UD, the next 19-year-old mass killer, complete with a list of grievances against fellow students, steps up for his photo!

… Uh, I mean… make that 18-year-old. Highly educated counties like UD‘s feature precocious and far better equipped slaughterers. Does your local tyke-killer have grenades and landmines? Color me proud!

We’ll all go together when we go;
What a comforting fact that is to know.

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

The defense team attempted to appeal to the judge by pointing to Chen’s status as an honor roll student with offers of scholarships at two universities…

A genius killer of children! Let him go! Free the guy! Two lucky universities (I wonder which? He’s local… GWU?) are competing for him… Alwin! Over here! Choose me! Choose me!

Speaking only for herself, and as a fellow resident of Montgomery County, UD would be honored to be mowed down by someone with amazing SAT scores.

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

[Chen’s attorney called him] a ‘good student’ who has come to school every day, doing the things that we tell kids to do – ‘Join the athletics team, join the clubs, get involved with school, bring a loaded Glock.’

I added the last thing. His attorney forgot to list it.

Nothing against your AR-15 or anything… We love frats here at Wash U and have just loved hosting you… And – haha – nothing to do with the whole Parkland thing… But… uh… could you leave?

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

And oh honey.

My lord what a morning.

If American universities actually start checking their fraternities for guns! It’ll be San Diego State all over again, baby! (Hm. Not really “all over again.” Guess it never really stopped.). Drug distribution networks around the country will be bereft, and no one will be able to figure out how to haze.

Fraternities are one of America’s very best places to hide weapons and drugs cuz you know – bright clean-cut lads preparing for the next charity carwash… Last place you’d look for AR-15s…

… Torrey Green, who graduated with a top-ranked 7.0 sexual assault average, and on whom the school looks back with pride. No better time for the school to celebrate Green than now, when he’s on trial for “12 felonies — including kidnapping and rape — in seven cases, after seven women came forward saying he sexually assaulted them while he was a student in Logan between 2013 and 2015.”

Of course, they came forward years ago, but USU didn’t do anything. USU puts its resources into maintaining Torrey Green’s hero-page.

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

USU’s finest is facing so many charges that his lawyer, in an act of editing-for-concision that Scathing Online Schoolmarm finds commendable, asks that all the cases “be merged to avoid ‘redundancy.'”

It’s so tiresomely repetitive, the details of one (yawn) rape case after another… You’ve heard one rape case you’ve heard ’em all…

This way we’ll save time and keep the jury awake…

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

And after all, I mean… entre nous… it’s Utah, where a man can lose track of his sister wives… I’m sure it’ll be easy to convince a local judge that Green’s large blur of womenfolk can be herded into one trial.

… but so’s the NCAA.

The life of the mind, USA, 2018.

… to… Raqqa!

This post has gone viral. As it should.

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

UD thanks her sister for the link.

… our nation’s schools.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm loves that genre of academic writing which is the outraged high-ranking campus sports-whore attacking legitimate professors and students at uber-jock universities. Before SOS talks about the email from an Auburn University dean that appears in my headline, she wants to share with you an earlier example of this classic clown-school missive.

In 2013, a women’s lacrosse coach at the infamous University of Louisville was informed that one of her players had been seen exercising her personal freedom by wearing a Michigan State sweatshirt. The coach left the following voice mail for the player:

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Schools like Auburn and Louisville are like this: They got nowhere else to go. They got nothin’ else. Nor, being game-cults, do they appreciate Winston Smiths who fail to conform to the cult. These schools got brain bashin’ ball or they got nothin’. They’re not about to go down without a fight when alien invaders like the New York Times expose their intellectual nothingness; they’re not going to let some random woman athlete introduce changes to their uniform; and they’re certainly not going to let some dissenting legitimate scholar get off scot-free. Me big macho school, on field and off!! GRRRRRRRR don’t make me mad….

It’s like… NCAA: FAAAAACK YOU.

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

Auburn got so pissed at the econ professor on the faculty who kept complaining about its massive bogus course system – centered on the keep ’em eligible public administration major – that its president

took the highly unusual step of suggesting that the entire economics department be moved elsewhere.

In a memo written on presidential letterhead, [Jay] Gogue recommended that [Michael] Stern be assigned a new supervisor and that the department “no longer be a part of the College of Liberal Arts.”

It’s just what I’ve been predicting, mes petites, and Auburn will clearly be the first school to actually do it: The football cult’s economics department, with its expert financial review of the athletic program and its commitment to academics, must go. Exile. Banishment. Siberia.

And not only that – see again the email that I quote in my headline, from Auburn Dean Joseph Aistrup to the dissenting econ prof. Belitting; threats; a demand for recantation. The whole Orwellian number.

Indeed here is the model for the econ prof’s next step: Room 101, followed by I ask only for you to accept my love of Our Leader.

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

[One Auburn professor] put a picture of Aistrup arm in arm with… the athletics director, on his office door, alongside photos of Joseph Stalin and Kim Jong-un.

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

SOS thanks a reader for sending her Jack Stripling’s CHE piece.

The American version of Sophie’s Choice is playing out in Mississippi, and it is every bit as agonizing – more agonizing – than what Sophie endured.

Guns v Football. Guns, Football, Collide. Guns or Football. Guns, Threats, and SEC Football.

If a new bill fails to pass, you will have to choose between the two things you love most: Your AR-15 and the Rebels. You will not be able to bring your gun to university football games.

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

Security officer, Vaught–Hemingway Stadium: You may keep one: football or the gun.

Snopes: Take my little girl! Take my baby!

… about his university’s athletics program. This blog chronicles tons of econ profs – people capable of actually running the numbers – who turn against their employers and detail the lies the schools tell about the money they’re spending on football. The latest guy is Colorado State University’s Steven Shulman.

[Student fees] have risen 45 percent since Tony Frank was appointed president of CSU in 2008.

Institutional support to athletics has almost tripled since 2008. These subsidies transfer resources from academics into athletics. As a result, CSU has not been able to increase instructional spending per student or protect itself from revenue declines.

Every time the state cuts CSU’s budget, the university is forced to cut academic programs. Only athletics is insulated from budget cuts.

CSU’s way-expensive new stadium hosts losing games attended by fewer and fewer people.

A commenter on Shulman’s column puts the matter well.

CSU [has] gambled $450 million (in bond repayments) on a sport that is a dying a slow death. Empty seats, phony bowl games, ethics problems – everywhere you look there are reasons to question the new stadium decision. The project can only be justified and supported by a few old alumni counting on tax benefits.

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

That “old alumni” thing has UD thinking about how we might retrofit football into a truly twenty-first century university curriculum.

Pretty much everyone agrees football is over – dying a slow death, as the commenter notes.

Figure it’s got another twenty years as a professional sport, ten years at the non-southern university, and thirty years at the southern. (Down south, they’ll have to wait until the fan melee that turns into a mass shooting to really finish off the game.) It’s not too soon to start thinking about how we can excite our ahistorical students (postmodern Americans are ignorant of history, and live in what one theorist calls a “radical presentness”) in things antiquarian by featuring football, alongside, say, the Salem Witch Trials, as examples of pre-Enlightenment American ways of life. We might not be able to get our students to study Latin, but we can certainly interest many of them in the study of football, which will feature, for instance, field trips to massive rotting campus colosseums.

… after a snowfall.

Taken by UD‘s friend Ari.

Nice writing about choosing the right vacation while still deeply mourning the sudden death of your husband.

As autumn approached, my parents agreed that it would be good for my mental health to skip my first holidays without Peter. “Let’s go on a trip,” my father said. “Anywhere but Asia or Australia. I don’t want too long a flight.”

“Let’s go to Peru,” I suggested. An avid bird-watcher, I had always wanted to visit the Tambopata region of Peru, home to the largest known clay licks on Earth. (A lick is a cliff where macaws, parrots, and parrotlets congregate to ingest mud, a vital source of sodium.) I can think of no more breathtakingly gaudy sight in the world. As our guide marched us through the jungle, day after day, in search of an ever-narrowing list of the area’s antbirds and antthrushes and flycatchers and manakins, I came to see the trip as avian psychopharmacology. It was a perfect, if privileged—and wet and buggy—way of avoiding the tinselled and ornamented triggers of the holidays.

Ronan Collins calls for no half-way measures – not a harmless nick here and a harmless nick there – but full surgical removal of the faculty member at Trinity College who loves him some mutilated female genitals.

Collins says: “I will be handing back my academic title of clinical associate professor [of medicine] if I feel the university’s response is not clear and firm in dealing with the matter.”

Especially if you’re a professor of medicine, the realization that there’s another professor somewhere at your university, in a position of authority and respect, who thinks torturing and mutilating little girls is a good idea — it’s simply too disgusting. Unbelievable, actually. Bravo, Collins.

Sing it.

An AR-15, peaches and cream,
Hair that sparkles and shines.
You’re nineteen, you’re lunatic, and it’s fine.

High velocity disintegrates me
Now I’m your angel divine
You’re nineteen, you’re lunatic, and it’s fine.