An investigation by this newspaper found that college students at 10 of Ohio’s biggest public universities are paying more than $135 million for intercollegiate athletics through either mandatory fees or university subsidies – and most of the students don’t even know it.

UD‘s first cousin once removed, Shenandoah University student Joshua Fleming, interviews himself about his participation in the upcoming 88th Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival Grand Feature Parade.

UD thanks her sister for the link.

… are here.

… private colleges’ endowments of more than $500 million. Such a tax, which would not impact individual gifts to the institutions and would be reduced by the amount the schools dedicate to financial assistance, could generate $6 billion for the federal government to use for President Obama’s free community-college proposal. That large sum also could be used more generally for federal student aid programs.

The comment thread for the Washington Post article tells you how profoundly Americans resent it when people interfere with their freedom to subsidize 35 billion dollar organizations.

Shifting the dollars generated under the scheme to community colleges? The rankest Stalinist tyranny. Harvard = The Kulaks.

Want to know what crushing guilt looks like à la UD? Guilt that she can’t lift the morning, afternoon, and late afternoon after?

It’s last night. We’re at Boston Logan Airport, and our Southwest flight to Baltimore is delayed an hour. Posted departure time, 10:50 PM. We’re sitting alongside one another – UD, Mr UD, La Kid – in those hard black chairs all in a row at our gate, and we’re tired and grumpy and overheated.

Suddenly a skinny young man dressed all in black bounds up before us and excitedly says Are you going to Baltimore too? Guess where I’ve been? He’s euphoric, in a state of bliss he has to share. His skinny black t-shirt says something that seems to be a pun on the word censorship.

I was just at the anime convention and guess what happened to me?

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Now understand. UD flies. She flies on planes. UD‘s a reasonably functional postmodern humanoid. But she is a bad flyer, and among the things she worries about when boarding is the possibility that her flight will include a disturbed person. A disturbed person who in a state of euphoria or rage or something will act in frightening ways…

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So who knows what she might have done if they’d been at an outdoor cafe or something but UD simply put her head down (she had her laptop out) and did not respond. Mr UD got up and went to get some food for the flight. La Kid, bless her, said What? What happened to you? He paused a bit, daunted by our unfriendliness. I… I got interviewed twice… His voice trailed off and then he trailed off. He took a seat by some enormous windows and was very quiet.

UD took a deep breath and felt terrible. She looked over at him and noticed that outside his window an amazing huge golden-red moon (a blood moon?) was rising, so she went over to where he was sitting and said to no one in particular Look at the moon! and the guy looked and smiled a little.

But this didn’t make UD feel any better.

She had taken the wind out of the guy’s sails, and you should never take the wind out of someone’s sails.

This guy, I realized, as I looked around, was one of many funny-looking anime convention people on this flight and I love their bizarrerie, I want to reward their bizarrerie. I want them to know I love their blue beanies that go round and round and make little whining noises (a woman on board the flight had one of these) and I love their socks that are designed to look like shoes. The weirder the better for the love of god!

Had UD‘s (fear-induced) coldness taken this young man, at the height of his bizarrerie self-confidence, to the I guess I’ll go crawl off and be a conformist for the rest of my life depths?

GAAAAHH!

Instantly after the publication of the Columbia School of Journalism report (everyone’s calling it “scathing”) about the University of Virginia rape article in Rolling Stone, the fraternity announces a defamation suit against RS.

If you want to get a sense of what their odds of winning are, here’s Eugene Volokh.

UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott does not mince words in the matter of the University of Minnesota and the death under its care of Dan Markingson.

There’s simply too much pharma money at stake for anything like true remorse, much less meaningful change.

But expressions of pride in the university in these circumstances are … UD has no words for that.

… to believe the original Rolling Stone article on the University of Virginia rape. She simply had a confidence in that publication that she of course no longer has.

RS has now retracted the story, following a Columbia Journalism School investigation that found the article full of elementary journalistic errors.

One neighbor who was fed up with the noise went to the house to address the problem. A police officer said he saw five men assaulting him, according to an arrest affidavit.

This time at the University of Texas.

Which wouldn’t think of suspending it, since “officers have been to the SAE house 40 times in the last 12 months when parties got out of control.” Has to be around 80.

UD first heard about Mount Auburn Cemetery from her mother, a gardener who loved to visit its famous arboretum. UD‘s sister-in-law recently attended Stanislaw Baranczak’s burial there.

This afternoon, she and others visited a Soltan grave on a Mount Auburn hillside overlooking a pond. A rafter of wild turkeys paraded by as they neared the hill, and they stopped their car and gawked. The tom displayed his brilliant various featherings.

Several males ran into the bathroom and were arguing about whether to call the police, and after another partygoer called 911 the males agreed to move [the fraternity pledge] outside so police wouldn’t have to come into the residence …

Another statement from student Alyson Alonzo to the university describes a similar scene. Alonzo, a trained lifeguard, said someone pushed Duffy’s stomach and he vomited. She tried to perform CPR on him but was dragged outside.

And bury the brass knuckles.

There’s a crackdown on beach toys this year.

… were. So what if UD has lived here most of her life. Walking to her first class yesterday (Modern British Poetry), skirting the Mall and the cherry blossoms, she was amazed at the spring, and she couldn’t imagine any students would show up to her class.

As she said to them a moment later (they all showed up):

Are you kidding me? [Looks out the windows.] No contest!

Let’s have class outside, one of them said, and others took up the cry.

I have, UD explained, an extremely long list of reasons why I don’t teach outside.

Such as? They wanted to know.

Such as even if this is in absolute urban terms a small well-mannered city it is still loud. There will be incessant airplanes taking off and landing. There will be sirens galore. Traffic will consist of groaning FedEx trucks and honking limos. If we go to the outdoor classroom (GW has an outdoor classroom, complete with podium and seating) we will almost certainly displace many innocents who have just set up their laptops in the sun. Groups of students and groups of kiddies from the childcare centers all around will drift noisily about. There are simply too many distractions.

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So we went.

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My students crowded into elevators, then followed, sheeplike, UD the shepherdess, past twelve or thirteen Starbucks. We tried our luck with the designated outdoor classroom, and there it was, glistening in the mild spring sun and – as anticipated – populated by various students. I felt guilty – but then I noticed a sign just under the podium asking students to please give way if a class wants the space, so okay.

UD made her voice louder than usual (UD has a very loud voice already – something about which Mr UD often has occasion to complain – but UD just as often explains that she grew up in a large loud Jewish family and then became a singer so what do you expect) as she talked about “Notes from Dialysis,” one of the many wonderful dreary British poems we’re studying. I thought of Hugo Williams inside inside inside, hour after hour after hour, so many days of the week, and sometimes gazing past the clinic’s windows at a world like this one – full sun, the flowers already coming up, and everyone milling about amazed… And within UD‘s view there were few people older than twenty-two…

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On her way to this poetry class (before she allowed herself to be persuaded to go outside), UD overheard the following conversation between two guys, two GW students, who were walking close behind her.

You know there’s not enough food here for the birds, right?

Well, we’re talking about the negotiations.

A town debates spring break.

Because we are all drawn into the world of the Internet, someone needs to step in and break that distraction. That responsibility falls on the shoulders of Saint Joseph’s University and its faculty. Many of my professors do not allow laptops and make that clear in the syllabus, but many others allow students free rein. These professors that allow laptops, however, often scold people for being on their cellphones. Why? Because they’re distracting. Then why not ban the laptop, a device that not only distracts the user, but also those around them?

More and more, American university students are forced to point out the obvious to their professors. Stop doing this.

It’s pretty unseemly – students having to tell their professors how to be responsible.

And responsible professors have, for the most part, stopped it.

What’s mainly left are the proprietors of what UD calls the morgue classroom, professors who keen over a PowerPoint while their students nod off to Netflix.

Everybody all tucked in and ready for bed.