… A&M!

[Texas] A&M’s offseason transgressions are many. Starting senior defensive lineman Gavin Stansbury was arrested this spring on charges of assault on the Rice [University] campus. He’s fighting the charges. Two of Stansbury’s teammates, safety Howard Matthews and receiver Edward Pope, were in a vehicle with him when they were pulled over by College Station police, and Matthews and Pope each were arrested at the same time as Stansbury for prior failure to appear in court.

Receiver Ricky Seals-Jones was arrested this offseason on charges of disorderly conduct, but he’s also fighting the charges. Quarterback Kenny Hill, who’s vying for the starting job, was arrested on charges of public intoxication. Touted safety Kameron Miles was dismissed from the program in early March for what has been reported as theft.

Last year, about half of [Coach] Sumlin’s starting defense was suspended for the Aggies’ season-opening victory over Rice after various misdeeds in the previous offseason.

And hell we’re just getting started!

[Darian] Claiborne and [Isaiah] Golden [were] arrested Tuesday on three charges each of aggravated robbery stemming from a drug-related incident on May 23.

“An Investigation at the scene found that the three victims had entered into an agreement to purchase a quantity of marijuana from the suspects (identified as Claiborne and Golden),” according to a release from the police. “When the suspects arrived at the apartment to complete the transaction, one of the suspects produced a handgun, pointed it at one of the victims while the other suspect took the money that was present to purchase the marijuana.

“While this was occurring, one of the victims stood up from the couch and was struck in the face by the suspect with the handgun. The suspects then fled the area on foot and the victims notified police.”

SING IT WITH ME!

We are the Aggies – the Aggies are we
True to each other as Aggies can be
We’ve got to FIGHT boys
We’ve got to fight!
We’ve got to fight for Maroon and White!

After we’ve strapped on our bulletproof vests
We’ll strut around campus to show we’re the best!
For we are the Aggies – the Aggies are we
We’re from Texas AMC!

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UD thanks a reader.

Some are born plagiarists, some achieve plagiarism, some have plagiarism thrust upon them, and some charge states half a million dollars for plagiarism.

So… there’s always a a little bit of hell to pay when the legislature has a chance to chat one on one with the people who run perennial scandal magnets like Rutgers University.

Of course, like most seriously fucked up schools, Rutgers reflects a seriously fucked up state. This is the state that gave us the gone but not forgotten University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. As one local columnist puts it:

[Stephen] Sweeney argues that scandals, including men’s former basketball coach Mike Rice penchant for hurling basketballs and epithets at players, have damaged the school’s reputation and “its ability to purse academic excellence.”

So [putting more political appointees on its board of trustees] would make sense.

Because nothing enhances a university’s academic reputation like a collection of Jersey pols.

You got your basic Scylla and Piscataway dilemma here… Jersey legislators… Jersey trustees…

Does it make sense for your university to have a president who doesn’t know anything? Who thinks that academics and athletics rise together? Who’s putting your school into deeper and deeper deficit because of this belief?

Fresno State’s president keeps the athletics program in deficit and continues borrowing – taking? – at higher and higher rates from the university. Sounds like a formula for academic advancement, doesn’t it?

An entire university as a temple of unreason.

… has been a particular problem at risible University of South Florida, where anyone trying to follow the huge initial salaries, huge buyouts, and hugely expensive new hires is liable to get whiplash. Between enraged trustees yelling off with their heads when coaches don’t deliver enough wins, and shit-faced coaches piling into their black SUV’s (“Car & Driver magazine’s official vehicle for the inebriated“) and weaving all over town, USF just can’t catch a break. Don’t even mention the coach dumped immediately before the drunk driver coach – the one that sent that naughty tweet.

USF is a sandbox full of hyper boys. Strange, for a university.

Oh honey. Why not tell the judge the whole story of your grade faking? If the judge knows everything, leniency will be that much more lenient. So let’s see. Here are the details:

In late 1998, [Mathew] Martoma, a graduate of Duke, altered the transcript of his first-year law school grades: He gave himself A’s in Civil Procedure, Contracts, and Criminal Law, rather than the B, B+, and B he’d earned, according to a Harvard Administrative Board report. He applied for clerkships with 23 judges using the altered transcripts. Weeks later, someone in the school’s registrar’s office discovered that the transcript had been changed. Martoma then withdrew the clerkship applications and told Harvard that the doctored transcripts had been sent out by mistake.

In a classic example of how the coverup is usually worse than the crime, Martoma appealed his dismissal from Harvard by arguing that he’d withdrawn the applications before he was caught and that the improper transcripts had been submitted accidentally. His efforts apparently involved creating a fake computer data forensics company, complete with a professional-looking marketing flyer, to corroborate the time stamps of his e-mails.

You didn’t just change a few grades! You created a whole fake company! You’ve got like seven aliases! You’re a real criminal, and because of your insider trading trial everyone knows it, and the fact of everyone knowing is a real source of suffering for you.

You see the same grounds for leniency in mafia trials in southern Italy. Yes, your honor, I’m a career piece of shit, but until now with omertà and all no one said it out loud. Show some mercy.

Veteran University Diaries readers know about what Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata – that form of local booster journalism that involves portraying football coaches who knowingly recruit dangerous criminals to our universities as suffering saintlike beings whose only motivation in these recruitments is a deep belief in The Ultimate Goodness of Man. When the dangerous recruits start doing what dangerous recruits tend to do – break the law and put everyone in danger – the local booster press doesn’t say the obvious, which is Why do we pay the highest-paid person on campus to cynically, with arrant disregard for the safety of our community, go to a lot of trouble to bring a very dangerous man into our midst? No, no. It always goes something like this:

Coaches like to believe … that they can rescue troubled kids, even save them. It’s a noble premise.

Far from being assholes who don’t care that they are exposing young and vulnerable people to hardened criminals (not to mention admitting people unlikely to take even one course with any academic legitimacy – but that’s a trifle here), these coaches are noblemen, pure of heart, so sure of the glorious transformative power of university football that they are willing to take risks other people won’t – they are willing to say Under the rap sheet of this running back beats the heart of a true gentleman, and though it won’t be easy I’m going to dedicate myself to finding that heart. Because that’s what Oklahoma State’s football team is all about – turning young men around.

And when the entire divinely-kissed scheme fails to work out, what then?

Why, coacha inconsolata, of course. His heart is absolutely broken. He is suffering.

… for the way in which the meaning we’re deriving from reading any one particular text – a poem, a short story – has as much to do with the somehow related texts we’ve already read as it does with the text we’re right now taking in… We bring to the reading of any “new” work a lifetime of encounters with precursor works, and this readerly past is always in play in any readerly present. Literary experience, from this point of view, is personal pastiche, consciousness-patchwork, the piling up of language then onto language now, a remembrance of written things past.

And this is a marvelous thing, if you ask UD, because it’s not merely about the pleasure of feeling one’s reading become enriched over … well, over years of reading. (A similar sort of operation occurs with the act of re-reading.) It’s also – more intimately – about discovering one’s personal truths through intuiting one’s literary recurrences. By this I mean that if you live long enough and read long enough you notice yourself circling certain poems, novels, pieces of music (this doesn’t have to be just literary, obviously); and that if you think about your own recurrences you can sort of intuit important things about yourself.

UD‘s using weasel words (sort of intuit…) for the knowledge literature yields because she believes, along with James Merrill, that art is as much about a sort of saving oblivion, a tactical and beautiful evasion of life’s stark truths, as it is a vehicle of those truths. Iris Murdoch calls art “close dangerous play with unconscious forces.” Play, you see. We all know there’s something childish about the pretend business of stories and, well, plays… They aren’t reality; they’re fable and metaphor and wild and crazy imaginings… And yet of course as cultures and individuals we tend to derive our most serious understandings of reality from these unreal entertainments; and this is arguably because they give us these truths in the only form most of us can accept them. Make them too stark and we look away; aestheticize them and we’ll give them a look. We’ll maybe even (this is Aristotle, on catharsis) allow ourselves – vicariously – to undergo the ultimate emotions relative to human fate while we’re engrossed in a dramatic tragedy on stage…

It’s all push and pull, I mean to say. Art – our experience of art – enacts at once our embrace and our evasion of difficult truths. And indeed our personal intertextual history, our particular eccentric reading life, can tell us a great deal about what we’re personally up against, what we’re resisting by way of existential instruction. Our reading history can tell us about our peculiar internal cost/benefit economy, about the complicated ways in which each of us works to sustain energy and happiness throughout our lives.

So for instance whenever I’m at the beach I think about my peculiar defensive relationship to a particular poem – Berck-Plage, by Sylvia Plath. It’s been important to me over many years not to understand this poem, to find it an impervious verbal surface. Yet I keep circling it – or it keeps circling me… When I was writing, a few years ago, about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I suddenly realized that its author, Jean-Dominique Bauby, encased in locked-in syndrome at a hospital on the French Atlantic coast, is gazing from its balconies at Berck-Plage. And then – odd coincidence – my friend and colleague Tom Mallon not only reviewed this book for the New York Times, but began by noticing the same Plath/Bauby intertextuality:

“This is the tongue of the dead man,” Sylvia Plath wrote in “Berck-Plage,” her poem set in a French hospital complex by the Channel coast. “How far he is now, his actions / Around him like livingroom furniture, like a decor.” A year and a half ago, following a catastrophic stroke and weeks of deep coma in that same hospital, Jean-Dominique Bauby gradually “surfaced” into a new existence as a victim of “locked-in syndrome,” mentally alert but deprived of movement and speech.

So… the poem insinuates itself, erodes my resistance, especially of course when I’m at the beach. It pressed itself upon me, an obscure intertext, when I read Bauby (I read him here, years ago, at Rehoboth Beach); and now it’s back again on a beautiful day on the Atlantic shore, and I’m listening to the YouTube I linked you to earlier in this post, of Plath, with her flat angry voice, reciting it.

The core problem, I suppose, is that this particular poem (I adore almost all of Plath’s poems) is insufficiently evasive; it is out there in the way of reality itself, and, really, who wants that? In “Berck-Plage” there’s nothing tempering Plath’s disgust and horror at our painful lives and our dreadful deaths; she simply contrasts the happy-making aspect of vacation beaches, the fully sunlit life, the smooth-limbed physical joy of children at the supreme play of beach play (On my morning beach walk today, I paused as a young boy streaked across the boardwalk in front of me on his way to the sand. BEACH! he shouted. BEACH!), with the disfigurement and debility that await us.

These children are after something, with hooks and cries,
And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.

We can do nothing for one another as our weak fallible selves devolve toward the end; we are all too small-hearted and afraid.

The scene shifts, in the poem, from the beach to a man’s deathbed. The poet looks at the dead man:

This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
Is he wearing pyjamas or an evening suit

Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak
Rises so whitely unbuffeted?

They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened
And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.

Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,
The pillow cases are sweetening.

He’ll be unstuck from the bed just as the lovers she’s seen at the beach “unstick themselves” after “obscene,” hidden sex. Once he’s gone he’s gone and it’s just a matter of resweetening his pillow cases for the next case.

They are flying off into nothing: remember us.
The empty benches of memory look over stones,

Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.
It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.

“Berck-Plage” is a beautiful stopping place. Only one doesn’t want to stop.

[F]or-profits entice students (particularly low-income students) with low upfront costs while offering little instructional support, thereby saddling them with large debts and few marketable skills.

…Education Management Corporation (EDMC)… was founded in 1962, and had long been reputed as one of the higher quality for-profits in an industry plagued by questionable practices. In 2006, EDMC was taken over by a private equity consortium led by Goldman Sachs along with Providence Capital Partners and Leeds Capital. Goldman and its partners installed new executives who promptly reallocated resources from instruction to marketing and recruitment.

… Total enrollment across EDMC’s brands, which include Argosy University, South University, Brown Mackie College, and the Arts Institutes, more than doubled between 2006 and 2010. By 2011, colleges in which Goldman Sachs was the dominant owner enrolled over 150,000 students, captured over $486 million in federal Pell Grant funds, and netted an operating profit of over $501 million. However, these financial successes were not mirrored in students’ outcomes: among those students enrolled in 2008, over 62 percent had withdrawn two years later without completing a degree. Yet two of EDMC’s Art Institute campuses were among the 10 for-profit colleges that that issued more than $25,000 in student loans per enrolled student in 2012.

… The takeover of the for-profit sector by investors has seen the principles and techniques of “shareholder value maximization” imported wholesale into a major segment of American higher education. This finance-driven model is very efficient at increasing enrollment and generating profits. It has a poor track record, however, when it comes to helping students successfully graduate and preparing them for a competitive labor market. Indeed, graduation rates for all four-year for-profit colleges for cohorts beginning six years earlier fell from 46 percent in 2002 to just 28 percent in 2012.

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UD thanks Dirk.

… fucking beautiful day,” as Alice de Janze memorably says in White Mischief, and it’s just like that here for the third day in Rehoboth Beach. Morning, afternoon, and night, all flawless. UD‘s sister the Morrissey fanatic is just back from Miami Beach (Morrissey concert) and reports it’s unpleasantly hot there.

Haha. As Gore Vidal memorably said, It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

Because he refuses to waste a moment driving around until the weather changes, Mr UD has not yet gone food shopping, so Les UDs are surviving on pastries from Papillon and dinners out.

… is all that Les UDs had hoped. The short drive from ‘thesda featured spectacular skies over the Chesapeake Bay as we crossed the long bridge.

Gist of conversation during the drive:

UD: Isn’t the idea – merely as first principle – that we’re so grubby God has to come down and be tortured to death to redeem us from our grubbiness a pretty convoluted – not to mention pretty rank – idea?

Mr UD: Not when you take the correct approach to it.

So far the weather’s been perfect: Big sun, mild air. Cloudless skies over the ocean. The horizon line has a piercing clarity; container ships seem to skate on a knife-edge. Shoulder season means it’s late enough to be warm (even hot), but too early for the low-flying planes advertising cheap beer. The almond cookie smoothness of the beach is only slightly undone by beach-goers, among whom we have already noticed some doppelgängers. One couple in particular… We walked by them as they unloaded their car into our building on arrival. They drove a Prius, looked about our age, had OBAMA stickers on their car (we don’t do stickers, but we do Obama) … Later, we saw them on the beach looking very Soltanesque — each reading what looked like a not very beachy book…

On her morning walk UD was reminded of one of many beach scenarios she enjoys: Children are incredibly intense about their sand castles. They have to be, because they’re building with an eye toward the structure being gradually flooded as they finish, so their timing has to be pretty exact. Thus no shrieking and running to and fro, but trancelike mindfulness upon the passage of all things…

Well, and UD likes very much the way beaches – especially beaches in the June sun – subdue us, channel us, create “the miniature gaiety of seasides.”

“I think every campus has faculty members who are cheap dates when it comes to academic matters related to athletes.”

He said it; I didn’t.

Note that the author of this piece goes from calling professors who’ll do anything for campus athletes “friendly faculty” to “cheap dates.”

UD proposes that we take the matter one step further, from the euphemistic friendly faculty to the almost-there cheap date to the fully honest sports whore. (Functional equivalent of the much better known pharma whore.)

Plenty of sports factories have a well-established corps of comfort women among their undergraduates, students whose job it is to … entertain hotly sought-after football and basketball prospects. Not only should it not be difficult for us to acknowledge that there are faculty members similarly willing to do almost anything for the team; UD thinks that schools like Auburn and Chapel Hill should sponsor self-studies (these could be carried out by sociology professors, for instance, or psychology professors) aimed at illuminating the background and character type of faculty liable to corrupt the school by the irresistible force of their attraction to athletes. Once we know more about this segment of the faculty, we can institute some reforms. Like barring them from being faculty liaisons to the sports program. And keeping an eye on that curious course (Sociology of Communications Studies of General Studies of Sports Marketing) they keep offering.

… for Rehoboth Beach, where they will spend the next two weeks in an apartment so close to the Atlantic that you can hear the waves.

This constant wave sound is very lulling, but UD can blog through it.

Which she will do with the same compulsive regularity as… the tides. Ne quittez pas.

Nah! The latest arrest was only for armed robbery and attempted murder! Wait til he actually kills someone!

Oklahoma State, which so avidly recruited the running back to its freshman class, has this to say:

An OSU athletic department spokesperson said a press release concerning the arrest would be posted as a general statement but is not expecting one to be issued at this time.

A general statement regarding the arrest… Hm… We see that one of our freshmen has been arrested for attempted murder… Hm…

But not at this time! No, not yet! Let’s wait until all the facts are in. Otherwise, we’re rushing to judgment, like those guys on our recruiting staff who said Whoa, maybe not this guy… Only eighteen and look at his priors…

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Sportsprose-wise, there’s some great shit here:

The accusations levied against Thomas are significant, and one can only assume that Oklahoma State might have second thoughts about him if he is ultimately charged.

Thomas has a ton of talent, but OSU can’t afford much bad publicity in the wake of an extensive expose released by SI.com regarding the football program last year. [Oy, don’t make me read all five parts again! Short version: OSU football stinks to high heaven.]

There is no question that Thomas deserves his day in court, however, he is faced with an uphill battle. This looks bad for him regardless, but perhaps he will be able to learn from it and become a better person moving forward.

What’s not to like in this prose, Scathing Online Schoolmarm would like to know? The last paragraph puts four cliches in two sentences and leaves us feeling warm and runny at the thought of how much OSU’s man is going to learn from having tried to murder someone.

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Only for those who think they can handle it: UD‘s chronicle of the last few years of sports life at one of America’s largest toxic dumps, Oklahoma State University.

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“For more on your favorite athletes and their troubles with the law, visit us at thefumble.com.”

It’s how you get the job done.